Steven T Webster posted on September 26, 2009
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Working on some new skins recently (using this super slick toolset from Artisteer) I started wondering why it's so damn hard to make a DNN site look good – I mean really good.
One of the things I noticed about some solutions that compete with DNN (Wordpress, Joomla, etc) is that they seem to have their collective acts together when it comes to design standards. WordPress goes so far as to make it part of their value statement and published it right on their homepage:
WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
One of the things I’ve started to notice about Artisteer is that it defines a style for every common (read standard) element on a page. So you H1 tag looks like “A” and your tables all look like “B” and your blockquotes all look like…
Well, you get the point. Standards.
I think that is part of the problem with DNN. While the DNN-O-Sphere is rapidly expanding (there seem to be more and more skin and module developers on snowcovered.com every day getting a module to look right within a skin you spent countless hours designing and tweaking is almost impossible.
The really good module developers at least allow you to control the layouts and styles through some sort of template engine, but still – I don’t want to take four days to make your module look like it belongs on my site. I want to buy it and drop it in and have it look great.
It should just match up based on my site’s CSS files. But in order for this to work – we need a common standard that defines the common style set for a DNN project.
So what can be done?
It’s simple. We need to define a CSS and Layout Standard. Call it a Conventions Document or something…but a standard list of elements that are common (W3C compliant) that both skin and module developers can use to ensure that all of the bits and pieces that can be assembled into a website on DNN not only work together but also look like they work together.