As a DotNetNuke core team member and a Web Standards advocate, I’ve been practicing techniques and recommendations published by W3C for years. I’m a strong believer of these standards have been pushing these practices to front-end development of modules and web sites in DotNetNuke.
Although the concept was widely accepted and implemented by many other CMS’ many years ago, XHTML/CSS approach in layout has just been one of the big focuses for DotNetNuke community recently.
When the DotNetNuke Experience team announced the Skin Contest a few months back, I took the opportunity to draft some design and layout to demonstrate some of the web standards techniques in DotNetNuke skinning. The idea and motivation behind it is to continue pushing for web standards compliance practices in the DotNetNuke community.
I personally designed and handcrafted the markup on ‘Collaborate’ with much attention to details. It is intended for personal and small business use and leaned towards freelance consultants who want to have a simple website with a few pages showcasing their work and telling the world about their services.
The approach I took to implement this design is strictly in XHMLT/CSS (a few CSS3 rules were used for design elements for browsers supporting it) and is using XHTML 1.0 transitional DOCTYPE. I have also committed to maintaining it and making improvements when new features are available in later DotNetNuke versions.
I had the honor of winning the DotNetNuke Deisgn Challenge in the ‘Business’ category voted by the judges for a few criteria including technical implementation, use of framework, and educational value.
You can view the demo of this skin package here and download it on DotNetNuke web site along with other winning skin packages.
Feel free to let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement.