I often hear from clients or people I do training for asking about the best tools for DotNetNuke skinning. While the question is appropriate to beginners in DotNetNuke skinning, it should be clear for someone who has done skinning before.

The answer is “There is none”.

If you’re new to DotNetNuke skinning, learning about the appropriate tools for your development is important. But what’s more important is the process of getting the job done quickly and effectively. DotNetNuke skinning isn’t hard that is required special applications to do. It is about utilizing the existing skills in web design and development that you have and applying to DotNetNuke environment.

I don’t know about you, but I since I started with web development (or skinning and UI design), the following web development tools have been my best friends. Not only do these tools helpful for DotNetNuke developers and designers, they’re also widely used by many others in the web community.

Here's my list:

1. Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox
2. Firebug Plug-in
3. IE Web Developer Toolbar
4. Safari WebKit

When it comes to usability, many people often see issues in transforming their designs into a DotNetNuke-based web site. DotNetNuke built-in features might prevent people from taking control over their design mock-ups. A few examples are the login, register, and user profile pages. Also, if you’re using terms and privacy default content from the framework, you might run into layout issues. It uses the current skin design and applies to the control you want to load on the page.

A common example is when clicking on register, the site takes users to a registration page and the layout of it is the one that you’re currently viewing (previously), it just loads different content.

Working on many projects (both custom and commercial modules from third parties), I've often seen repeated mistakes that developers made in module development. I decided to write a short blog post to share a bit experience about don'ts in module development with the hope to make the job easier for others.

Here are the three common mistakes:

1. Use of the <br /> tag to create padding or margin between elements
2. Fixed width in module layout
3. Inline CSS straight in the code