I’ve been a big fan of using grid in most of my work in recent years. One of the main things I enjoy doing it is because of the symmetrical of the design and the aspect of re-using many of the CSS selectors within the same project. It’s exciting to write less markup and CSS to do more with design and implementation. And as many have heard “less is more”; by using CSS framework, it allows you to do just that.

I consider DotNetNuke community (at least the web designer community within DotNetNuke) is sort of a laggard group in adopting web standards until recently. Many people have talked and written books about the benefits of using web standards as well as how to do it properly, but I’ve seen a slow progress within DNN community.

For those of you who are using DNNMenu (or DNNNav) from the core DotNetNuke framework, you might notice there is a huge change in DotNetNuke 5.x with the inclusion of DNNMenu version 2. The change for this webcontrol had not been well documented in details so people might find a hard time to get up to speed with what’s new when using it.

As you may know, many experts in the DNN forum have been talking about eliminating SolPartMenu and start using DNNMenu for years when developing skins, but the details about controlling the design of this challenging webcontrol isn’t easy to find or even unavailable out their on the web.

Recently I had an opportunity to play with UnloadCSS skinobject from Timo Breumelhof. What a nifty little tool to use for your front-end performance optimization.

I wrote an article a while back about cleaning up your default.css from the framework (or just get rid of it). There are many unnecessary CSS files get loaded within the framework (not to mention some not-so-good practices in CSS coding techniques within these files) that a web designer wants to take control of. Default.css is one of those files that need improvement.

Designing with grid has been around for decades and applied through various traditional design mediums. But in recent years, the trend to use this technique on the web has become quite popular since many influential web designers took the initiative to introduce it to the world. Among those is Khoi Vinh, a Creative Director for The New Yorks Times Online, and Mark Boulton, a well-know author for publishing his series of his approach in grid design.

Many people have discussed the benefits of using grids so in this article, I won’t be talking much about why you should use it. There will be a different post to discuss the reasons to follow grid designs and when to use it.

Often I see people asking about how to design a web site and implement it using DotNetNuke framework while maintaining the integrity of the design. The answer I have is to start with a cleaner CSS file. As we know the team at DotNetNuke has their reasons for keeping the default.css file intact, it does not mean that it prevents you from making changes to the file yourself.

I always start with a project using my very own version of this file. Since the last release of version 4.x, I cleaned up the file and use it across many sites for both client and personal work. If you’d to see how it looks, feel free to download it here (please login if you're already a registered user, if not, go ahead and create an account) and throw it in your testing environment to replace the current one that you have. You’ll be in complete control of your design, I promise.

With the new skinning changes in DotNetNuke, it may be helpful to give an overview of available approaches to skin developers.