I have a design that needs to be converted to a "DNN-friendly" design.

So, the exact concept does not need to be exactly duplicated.

The bigger goal is for the general concept to exist in some manner that works well with DNN.

So, to me that means:

• offer different widths (fixed or flexible)
• allow the different panes to fit within the skin, like banner, header, left/center/right, etc
• allow a horizontal navigation menu that won't be too small or cause the page to look funky when logged in.
• have a uploadable logo that fits nicely into a designated logo area

This site was designed a few years ago (as just a demo), without any of these concepts:
http://www.equestrianworld.org/kaha3/

• So, it's a fixed width design, with navigation on both top and side.
• It has one content area.
• The banner is not easily replaceable, it's tightly integrated to the design.

In DNN, I don't think the current design will work well "just as it is". It couldn't take advantage of a lot that DNN has to offer.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to rip the concept apart from the current physical design, and translate it into something that could take advantage of what DNN has to offer.

If it were just copy the design and add the DNN tags, that would be different.

But my gut tells me this concept and physical design just doesn't "have dnn in mind".

I'm sure I'm not the first person to think "yuuck, this is going to be really limited" about a design, so I'm looking for your experiences and suggestions.

:)

Extreme,

Tell me more about what you mean by this....

"you can table your horizantal menu to push it to the right adding additional <td> in the same row."

Working template so far:

http://www.mylittlesitethatcould.com/Home/tabid/456/Default.aspx?SkinSrc=[L]%2fskins%2fkaha%2fkaha3

I did an almost direct translation. I simplified a bit of html while I was in there. The ribbon image is still in 4 parts, I think it could be reduced to just one.

Still looking for ways to improve:

DNN:

• There's no place for a Logo that is managed/uploaded by DNN.
• There's no place for a Banner, ie, the horse photo collage in the top/right side area cannot be swapped out by a user.
• Nav Width overflows since it is fixed width.

Design in General:

• Content area is narrow, about 700 pixels wide
• Printing is ugly. I know DNN can have a print icon on each module, I would prefer to have a print media stylesheet so everything non-design related on the page prints at once.

hmm... it looks to me like you've jammed a copy of the default DNN skin into the middle of an existing template.

You really should be building the skin from scratch so that you can organise the skin objects, the content panes and your page graphics to work together properly.

I can understand that it would be easy to have thought that the DNN default skin was somehow a required component for a site, and that it would need to be squeezed as a whole into one's template, but that isn't the case at all. DNN skins are made from dozens of individual objects that can be placed and styled wherever and however you like. The default skin is merely an example of such a skin... and whilst it can be altered a bit, it is not really a suitable base for your design.

There's no simple solution here other than to learn how to build a DNN skin from scratch. Once you've done that, youl'll be able to pick and choose what DNN components you want to use, place them in your template, and style them as required.

Regards,
Rob