You can set up a website with DotNetNuke ‘out of the box’, however it's almost certain that you’ll want to apply your own branding. In the DotNetNuke world, this process is called ‘skinning’.
Any DNN project or solution will involve the use of a skin. The DNN ‘ecosystem’ is supported by a choice of several thousand off-the-shelf skin designs. Indeed there are many excellent ready made skins to choose from however it is unlikely that there is one to exactly match your corporate brand.
In this case Chord9 can develop a custom skin to match your existing corporate brand. Additionally the fine control that custom skinning provides will mean that your skin can be designed to meet the latest technical standards, accessibility requirements and incorporate essential search engine optimisation techniques.
Our skinning process can start from several points – your existing site or your corporate branding guidelines. We can also work with your branding designer or accept your creative brief and undertake a complete design process.
In addition to meeting your branding requirements, Chord9 custom skins benefit from:
- Custom navigation/menu controls - designed to maximise performance, improve search engine visibility, aid site accessibility and meet XHTML and CSS technical standards
- Improved performance – ‘light-weight’ coding to optimise the speed performance of your site in today’s bandwidth hungry environment
- Cross browser and cross platform testing – We will test skins for consistent appearance and performance across a range of browsers (Microsoft IE8, IE7, IE6, Firefox 3.5, Firefox 3, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari) on PC and Mac platforms (where relevant) as required by your target audience
- Standards compliance – Skins are developed and tested for compliance with the prevailing W3C XHTML and CSS standards
- Accessibility – an increasingly important aspect of web development and Chord9 can undertake additional accessibility testing and reporting as required. See link
One of the many benefits of the DNN system is that content is separated from the design. This allows site wide modification or even complete change of a site’s visual appearance without disturbing the content. In this way updating the look and feel of your site following any branding change is a straight forward process and does not require a complete rebuild.