If your needs go beyond photos, blogs, wikis and forums, CS might not be a able to meet your needs to the future. I don't know if CS has a plugin framework where you can plugin new features seemlessly and if it does, how much would it cost you to pay a developer.

DNN has a tons of modules and skins. I think CS's features are better than the comparable DNN built in ones but you can always buy commcerial ones which have more features. DNN is free. CS is not. I don't believe they have a free community version anymore.

 Thanks very much. The DNN Creative site was very impressive and looks quite helpful. I'm just ending up about 4 months redesigning my site as I  move it to Asp.net. Quite frankly the idea the redoing the redo at this point is rather unsettling but I suppose that would be necessary for any CMS system.

Two questions - I've used multiple master pages and CSS to create the site; how difficult is it to translate master pages/css to the DNN modules?

My hosting service will help me as the site goes from html to aspx.  (I have no idea what that involves on their end). If I put the site into DNN modules is it better to do its turned into aspx? I guess the question I'm asking is if the switch to DNN involves much on their end? Is it better to do it all at once or does it matter/ I'd rather the get the new site up now and then incorporate it into DNN - if thats what I end up doing.  

As Paul explained the concept of a Master Page is very similar to a skin.  In both cases it's a page that has certain static areas and certain areas that allow content to be injected.  With a master page (at least in ASP.NET) you specify contentplaceholders and then build content pages to fill those spaces.  With a skin you just add a server side <DIV> and it will show as a contentpane in DNN.  You can drop any module into that contentpane.

If your current site consists of aspx Master and content pages you can fairly easily convert that over to a skin.  Wherever there is a contentplaceholder in the Master page you change it to a server side <DIV> and drop a Text/HTML module in it.  You can then put the content of your content aspx page into the Text/HTML module and it should pretty much work.  There will, of course, be some tuning.

If your host supports ASP.NET 2.0 or better and SQL Server you should be OK.  You just upload the DNN platform and update the web.config file to point at the SQL Server.  You can then install your content, skins, third party modules and anything else.  DNN will build out your database tables, indices, constraints, etc.

DNN comes with a lot of free modules.  Many times they will be enough for what you need.  If they are not you can find tons of third party stuff at: www.snowcovered.com.

BTW - I've had pretty good luck mixing standard HTML or ASP pages within a DNN site.  They're just redirects like anything else.  I don't know about being able to pass the authentication through in a single sign-on sort of deal.  I also don't think you'll be able to use the authentication built into DNN to determine who can access a non-DNN page.  You may be able to secure those pages in the web.config file as I believe DNN uses the standard ASP.NET Membership and role providers.

Good luck,

BK