Hi, I'm very new to DNN.  Can someone give me some good tips on how to design my own template?  What kind of software do you use to do it.  Thanks in advance.

For pretty much every skin I've done, I work it up in Dreamweaver / Notepad++. I taught myself how to skin using the Skinning Docs and looking at how the default Blue skins were put together. To get started, make 2 files: myskin.html    and    myskin.css   make a simple layout and put in the [MENU]   and  [LOGIN] tokens, then put in a table with the following code:

<TABLE width="100%">
  <TR valign="top">
    <TD class="contentpane" id="ContentPane" runat="server" valign="top"></TD>
  </TR>
</TABLE>

Save, compress all files to myskin.zip and then upload that file through the host > skins page, and that's a very basic page for you.

Some sites I've worked up so far (however I've been skinning DNN for ~1yr so far) are:

http://www.crosscreekplantation.com

http://www.parksidepediatrics.com

http://www.tigertownevillage.com

Good Luck