In theory...you create a user control "sharedheader.ascx" and "sharedfooter.ascx" (names are for illustration, they can be anything) and then you put the common content into the respective files. THen, in the skins, you register the new user controls: <%@ Register TagPrefix="uc" TagName="SharedHeader" Src="SharedHeader.ascx" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="uc" TagName="SharedFooter" Src="SharedFooter.ascx" %> in each skin and then replace the duplicate code with: Y OU have to make sure that any user controls or tokens that are referenced in the sharedfiles are referenced in those files at the top. For example, <%@ Control Language="vb" AutoEventWireUp="false" Explicit="True" Inherits="System.Web.UI.UserControl" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="dnn" TagName="LOGIN" Src="~/Admin/Skins/Login.ascx" %> And then you could have the login control in this elements code. HOWEVER, in practice this has been a little more difficult. I couldn't remove all the user controls and place them in the shared file. The menu calls (HouseMenu in my case, but also the SolPartMenu object, had to be referenced in the skin, they threw an undefined error otherwise. Also, i had used a variable SkinPath to dynamically load some style sheets in after the page was built and suddenly this variable was undefined when called in the sharedheader, but was fine when called form the skin. Strange. Anyways, a couple hacks later and all seems to be working fine. Hope that leads you in the right direction. Note: Beginning DotNetNuke Skinning & Design has really helped out with a lot of these issues. worth getting

Thank you both for your advises.

Timo, I tried to do it with the SSI as you recommended. But while the HTML itself works, the SkinObjects are not parsed, so I will get a Skin with correct header and footer, but with [TOKENS] instead of parsed SkinObjects.