As many of you may know, I work closely with the development team at Engage on various projects. One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen is that developers use <br /> (BR) to create padding between elements. Sometimes, I see big chuck of BR element being used across just to create a larger padding between their elements. This isn’t new to many developers; I often see it in many commercial modules we bought as well.

If you find yourself doing this religiously and not know what it means (some developers know what the BR element does but choose to do so), it is your time to change this bad habit by using the proper HTML tag: the <p> (P) tag.

Many web visitors know what a link does on a web page. For web developers and designers, links can perform certain actions in different context; however, it still is going to look like a link to end-users. Pre-defining the CSS selectors (doing the designer's job) on certain links in DotNetNuke framework or any CMS for that matter is not necessary. Sometimes it can cause some additional work for others.

In DotNetNuke, there are CSS selectors called SkinObject and CommandButton. These two selectors are essential parts of DotNetNuke links to define the look and feel. It is kinda self-expalined that if you want to style the links for any skin objects, you'd find the SkinObject selector and override it in your skin.css file. The same technique goes with CommandButton, but you need to identify which link in the framework that uses SkinObject and which one that uses CommandButton.

Rating is something that I have never seen anybody in DotNetNuke community has done it right. It might sounds pretty extreme, but if you have seen something that provide values as what I am going to discuss in this blog, please feel free to direct me there.

I sometimes run into modules (whether if it is free or commercial) that provide rating ability on articles or products in a way that is… somewhat useless to visitors. Things like five-star-rating is one of most common mistake I’ve seen around. Unless you show the amount of people rated on the article and give them an average rating, it does not mean much if you just show visitors that this article has been rated 4 out of 5. This isn’t rocket science that you have to be a UX expert to figure out how to provide values; I believe this is just common sense to most people.