Hi Michael

To put it simply... a skin is a webpage design/layout that uses content areas and skin objects/tokens to dynamically fill these in when it runs.

My best understanding of a template is this is a website structure - pages and content preset.

Easiest way I see skin creation really is to create the page design and layout in html... without great concern for actual content but more placement and CSS styling.   Save the html as .ascx, then take an existing skin .ascx file and modify so it's along the same lines - header stripped out (and no body tags), tokens/skin objects added as needed etc.

If you do a search on DNN skinning tutorials you'll find a few things.

Hope it helps!