I've used quite a few image replacement techniques in web design in the past to create better typography for the web. But recently I've ran into a technique improved by Scott Kellum that proved to be effective as well as enhancing the performance of the site.

If you're a web designer, you've probably heard of Fahrner Image Replacement technique. It's essentially using CSS text-indent property and set it to a very larger negative number such as -9999px so the text isn't visible to users.

For those of you who are very tedious about front-end performance of websites, you’re probably already  familiar with a few techniques to minimize loading resources from the core DotNetNuke framework such as CSS and Javascripts. As long as those files are just for presentation and can be addressed in skin.css or skin.js, this approach helps tremendously with site performance and creates a much better experience for site visitors.

I consider myself to be pretty detail-oriented when it comes to designing and building websites. I spend quite a bit of time on the very small details until I’m happy with it. Sometimes it’s a good thing; sometimes it’s bad because the ROI might not be worth it.

If you're running an online business I assume you have already designed your fan pages on Facebook. If you haven't I don't think it's too late to jump into the bandwagon and join everyone out there. Many companies like Intel or Nokia have their own design on this social network and it creates quite a nice experience for users instead of staring at the old blue default color of Facebook.

The DotNetNuke Design Challenge announced a few weeks ago and the submissions are all in. I know many of you are as excited as I am to see what our community has produced this year. My first impression is that every year we can see our community grows from creative aspect to technical implementation. You’ll agree with me when you see the published submissions here.

The next step is pretty simple: voting!

We’re now open for public voting for the ‘Community Favorite’. You can vote once a day and be automatically entered into a daily drawing to win prizes. But before you jump off and start reviewing designs and voting for your favorite, make sure you read the notes below.

The skin contest last year was a great opportunity for many people to show off their skills while ‘giving back’ to the community with their free skins and design.

Since the technology landscape is always changing, the User Experience team thinks it’s time to challenge our community once again in the DotNetNuke Design Challenge so everyone can get involved by building something cool (if you haven’t already).

As you might know, DotNetNuke skinning involves more than just writing semantic markup and packaging files; we want to show the world the powerful skinning engine with freedom to creativity. We are proud to bring you the third contest this year!There are fewer categories this year and more awesome prizes!

This year DayOfDNN is hosted in Charlotte, NC on June 2. Although the timing of the event isn't perfect for me since I've been on an extended vacation and now trying to catch up with things. But I've never been to Charlotte before so I'm looking forward to visiting.

I'm speaking this year on the responsive design topic. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it is a technique to create websites and web apps targeting various devices based on their resolution.

I look forward to meeting with old friends and making ones at this event. It'll be a great one! Just in case you're going, below is the description of my talk. See if you can make it and I'd love to chat more about it if you are interested in learning how.

Over the years I have been a strong web standards advocate and implemented most of my projects using its foundations. Since I joined DotNetNuke Corp. in mid-March, I was lucky to be part of the transformation of the administrative user interface (UI) to a modern standard. This effort brings many benefits to the platform for both business and end-users.

If you are not familiar with many benefits web standards have to offer, I suggest reading a few helpful posts by the folks at Web Standards Project and the Mozzila Wiki before continue reading this post to understand why DotNetNuke has gone through a major overhaul of UI changes.

We’re proud to announce this year keynote speaker at Day of DotNetNuke Chicago event is Nik Kalyani. If you haven’t been around the community much, Nik Kalyani is one of the co-founders of DotNetNuke Corp. He’s a real talented individual who wears many hats within DotNetNuke.

Nik has been an integral part of the ecosystem. With his creative and the passion for innovation within community, he has led many DotNetNuke engagements. The most recent community engagement is DNN mobile Hackathon in St. Louis which received tremendous support from people not just from St. Louis but across the country.

I just want to make quick update to everyone who has been following the Day of DotNetNuke Chicago event coming up in October. We’re now have published our list of awesome speakers and wonderful sessions. Check out the site and learn more about those respected community and core team members.

There are plenty of sessions that are aiming to help you get up to speed or learning the best practices when walking away from the event. Whatever your background might be, we have broad list of topics that should help satisfying your thirst of DotNetNuke knowledge. Day Of DotNetNuke Chicago topics include design, mobile development, content administration, ecosystem, and development.