Hello,

I agree with Nina that for general skinning VS is not the "best tool" well to some degree. :)

I find using Microsoft expression is a really awesome tool to use for skin development. Mainly cause well its cheap 100 Bucks for the upgrade option which is goes for any websoftware counts. Meaning if you have dreamweaver you can get the "upgrade licenses" for Microsoft expression web. Or frontpaget etc. Anyways. The thing I love about expression is the way it handles CSS you can drag and drop CSS from one file to another. This helps cause you can build your whole site with the CSS applied locally, and just drag and drop it to a general CSS later on. Helpful for when you have multiple people working on servera different skin layouts, IE a 3-pane, 5-pane version, etc they can develope locally and then all combine into the main CSS for the skin. You can also attach any exsisting CSS file and drag and drop to and from its very nice and smooth. Since its based off visual studio you can get a rough feel for your skin via preview which loads a local port based webpage to view. Granted the tokens won't render but you can get a good visual feel for the skin. You can also have it preview in any acceptable resolution for your computer and with any browser installed. Its really nice to work with. Overall I prefer it much more compared to Dreamweaver.

Now I personally love using visual studio for all my skin development but that is because I don't need the design layout for my skins, and it has much better support for writing aspx based skins. Note I write most of my stuff in html / xml / css style cause I offer it for free / cheap. I however make small edits to attributes etc via the aspx instead of uploading the whole skin. Over and over, once I have my final package I roll it out with both options. Html / aspx

I guess my point is everyone has their own choice of software, and each piece does it a little differently, but none is better or worse then the next, just pick one you like to use and go from there. I do however suggest going with expression web or dreamweaver for skin develop if you are new to it. Cause you will want the visual presentation they provide.

As nina said though the big piece of making DNN skin is knowning how to code html / css properly. After you know how to code html / css then you can start to research some of the finer points of how DNN work, like what order of CSS files it cascades with, what CSS sytles to overwrite to get the desired effects etc.

The good news is its pretty simple to learn, and you quickly will build a skin library to go off from, making it fast and easy to build more / different skins with much less work.

Hello Kepperofstars,

Thanks for all the input. As I told Nina I looked at many free skins and did not find anything I like. Do you offer this kind of DNN skin service?

Tony Knowler