xdDesign Blogs

DotNetNuke Community Choice Awards
XD Design  Most Creative / Original Finalist  – EvolveOne80

You can vote HERE

This site was one done for a reseller who orignally came from a php background, familiar with xmod and tried out joomla first before seeking our advice on how to get a site to look as his customer expected. We didn’t have anything personally to do with the customer directly and all matters regarding design and implementation were done through our reseller.

From the onset, we knew the job was going to be a challenge as the designer in mind has a vision on how the site should operate and look, one completed.

The project was very challenging and at times we had to redo things several times over until we got the finer details right, but once we had set the ‘agreed requirements’ in place, it was smoother sailing, although even right to the end, alot of time was spent in getting the details right.

Unfortunately, we were not able to give the 100% compliant thumbs up, and that was something I would loved to have taken to the next level, but alas, when the money runs out, the money runs out and it was decided that the look and feel of the package was more important from the designers perspective.

There are some unique elements to this project that I’ve not done before or since, and I never get tired of looking at this elegant, subtle yet quite cleverly put together website.

With a mix of some hard coded elements, customised login controls, css trickery (I call it that when you have to push CSS just that little bit further that you really like to), we were able to and after evaluating the clients requirements, set about working with the configuring the job appliction page with one of our favourite modules – Property Agent – from Ventrian – and guys, this is a must have subscription for marketers, resellers, developers and end users alike. We love this module and have use it extensively in our projects. You should too!

Some of the finer details I would like to share with you, that were requested by this client include incredibly tight colour coding. As you can see with the selected colours of Red, Blue & Green, every section of the site was carefully colour matched and no detail was spared in getting the icons, bullet points, flash, branding, you name it.

Multiple skins were required to achieve the final result and a mix of menus including the inventua side and top menu which worked well with their ability to be coded elegantly with css to get the look and feel the client was after.

The designer of the website provided a set of guidelines, and to be honest, there wasn’t much flexibility at all – somewhat demanding and interestingly enough, DNN was the choice for this php based company because there were unable to get the look and feel provided by the designer using their other solutions.

The designer was also a Mac dude.. who only ever looked at things in Safari – and that was also a challenge, because a while ago, Safari wasn’t as good as it is now, so we had the added overhead of browsers to contend with and when tweaking and working with CSS as much as we did, it does become somewhat fragile.

After seeing that this could cause some issues, we set about tightening and toughening up the skin to allow the web administrators to add content without fainting and with some instructions and modifications to the html editor were able to deliver something that the non technical owner was able to use.

Overall, this site, although subtle and light, is incredibly unique in it’s overall result with an eye for detail on all aspects of the different areas, talent, foundation and evolution. Unique, consistent and incredibly clever in how it’s been put together.

Here is a quick overview

• Individual Flash
• Extensive and individual CSS
• Clickable menu bars
• Customised menus
• Customised Login control
• Customised Editor

This really was a beautiful website and the clients are very happy with it and enjoy the features and functionality that DotNetNuke has enabled them to have. It was also quite satisfying to know that DNN was chosen above the resellers normal xmod and joomla platform to provide their customer with a solution they simply did not want to compromise on.

I hope you have enjoyed this overview.

Nina Meiers