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DotNetNuke Community Choice Awards, (Most Informative)
XD Design Finalist Overview – DNNSKINS. Site overview.

Most Informative – DNNSKINS

DotNetNuke Community Choice Awards

XD Design Most Informative Website Finalist  – DNNSKINS

Well, can you imagine my feelings when my own project DNNSKINS.com was nominated as a finalist in this competition. I was quite excited and honoured because there are quite a few sites around built on the DNN platform that offer information the public, so it was good to see that our very busy website made the cut.

I will share some information about this website for those who may not know and help you understand how and why we manage things in this fashion because it is slightly different to many of the download sites that are around, and there was a balance between actually being able to manage things without needing a large team of authors and editors and technical people. To a certain point, perhaps the actual structure doens’t make it as easy to engage other participants, but as DNN changes, we are now able to look at other methods of providing community information that is able to suit our style of site management.

I used to have lots of free skins on http://www.xd.com.au, but I found that it was somewhat confusing for people coming to my website who were not DNN savvy and had no idea what to expect, and the domain name XD didn’t have any relationship with the product when you think about it. I didn’t own dnnskins.com at the time, it was owned by Josh Weinstein who was a part of the core team and was started back in 2003 with great gusto. And it was at the time, fairly self sustaining where people could upload skins, write about them and people could download and comment on them.

This all sounds great, but as it grew, and DNN grew, it got very difficult to manage, and updating, intial interest by those who put skins online waned a little, and what happened was as DNN grew and changed, the skins didn’t. There was the challenge of getting an online store working within DNN – which didn’t ever eventuate on DNNSkins because to be honest, DNN wasn’t as stable and robust as it is now, and we had a period of very difficult times over the years, in particular – DNN 1 >DNN 2 – where skinning became a reality, then, the horror years where DNN 2 became DNN 3. I think that was the most painful time because while it wasn’t a rewrite of DNN, it might as well been with the problems of moving the project forward and when I acquired DNNSkins a few years ago, it was built on the DNN 1 framework. Most of the skins were for DNN 2, and we were already on DNN 3 and the skins weren’t compatible, no one was supporting them because they were busy, not interested, not there any more, different focus, whatever… the point is I needed to review how to move forward with something that was very close to my heart.

I’ve been an advocate of providing a level of free information and products to the community because I love the project and since I can’t write code, I turned my skills to skinning. And while I am not by any means a javscript or css guru, it’s the understanding of DNN as well as a very good knowledge of skinning that I feel sets XD Design apart from others when it comes to offering skinning solutions. We dont’ take short cuts, no matter how much I would love to, I feel it would simply come back and bite us with support issues which we don’t have the infrastructure or desire in handling. EG.. do it once, do it right so, so while we’re not the cheapest, we certainly give exceptional value for money by way of advice along the way and really beautiful skins that our clients never seem to have problems with.

So, having said that, let’s look at why dnnskins.com is like it is… XD Design is a very lightweight boutique style business, we don’t employ staff we don’t need when we can contract out to the best developers in the world, quality projects and work with them on delivering solutions. But the downside to that is we don’t have lots of staff on hand to ‘manage’ sites and most of it is done by me. I personally manage too many sites and have found that it has come back to haunt me when I can’t be in 5 places at once, so last year, after getting a new accountant, some good advice and a couple of the ‘right staff’ set about making changes to how we handle things.

It meant that I had to do things differently in the handling of our free skins and while for some it seems a bit odd, we use a shopping cart by Catalook, setup as a gallery where people can browse, pick and choose their skins, add to cart, then check out and download. I did this because it meant I could manage the products online through importing rather than individually managing each product and, if someone wants to put a skin online, they can, as we have the setup to allow others to upload skins and put them online for free.

We also had to redo every single skin we had in the upgrade path between dnn 2, dnn 3 & 4, and earlier this year, redid every single skin we had to dnn 5 and are at the stage of not doing any more skins for dnn 4 to be able to extend what we can do because managing these skins and uploading them is quite a challenge. We have over 300 files online of both free and commercial skins and have segmented them where possible to make finding them easy.

I wasn’t sure of what people wanted or if people really cared about what they downloaded, in as much as how much was the community growing and was finding that it was a very one sided website as it seemed that all people would do is log in and download a skin, without me knowing much about what it was people were looking for.

It was then I thought – how do I ask and interact with people and find out what they’re after, and then decided that I would provide an incentive, not by way of money, but effort to see if people really were around wanting to download skins or should I perhaps be looking at scaling this back and just leaving it, as so many other sites end up going. DNNSKINS.com has more users than any other project out side the dotnetnuke.com website. I would love to talk my subscribers more, but have really struggled with finding robust and affordable email solutions. For me to email users on a regular basis, if I had a paid product like constant contact or exacta or mailchip would cost me literally thousands each month and for a free site it just isn’t feasible and this mail problem is the main reason we dont’ send out mail on a more regular basis. Having said that, we have a new client coming on board where we will be sending close to 1 million email per month so we have built a new server, and when that has been rolled out, then I expect that to be our next change – more regular updates. I think sometimes people are not aware of the logistics of managing sites and data and information like this. At XD Design we handle alot of data and alas, on our beautiful dnnskins site which is my pet love and project, it can be frustrating sometimes for me to simply have to put things on the back burner to manage the ‘paying’ projects. So I digressed a littled but you have more insight now as to some of the innerworkings of our sites.

Anyway- I thought – how about a facebook page.. what is the purpose of it? Well, I thought – if you want something, talk to me, show me if you’re interested, so I know. I don’t want a site filled with google ads and things not relevant to the audience.. but I need to know what you want .. The facebook fans page really worked out well. I said for every 20 fans we get, we’ll put on a free skin, and the fans have come, voiced their opinions, we listened and now, we have over 500 fans and interesting interation .. and I’m sure alot of ‘lurkers’ who watch and see what Nina comes up with next. It’s not orthodox in how we do things, and I do not apologise for that, and our next step is to send out a simple email to our users and ask them about put in a vote for our site, and what their feelings are if the next lot of free skins we put online are only dnn 5. We have 6 new skins to put online to keep up with our fans page, but need to streamline the work involved and rather than change it to be 1 free skin for every 50 users, which we package for dnn 4 & dnn 5, can we move to keeping 1 free skin for every 20 fans and only for dnn 5. That would really assist us in the skinning, packaging and deployment. We would also like to start working with some of the cool widgets that dnn 5 can offer, but as you can imagine, we have to draw a line somewhere.

We have found the catalook store is quite a nice solution for us, but have found that we have so many nice FREE dnn skins online that it’s not much incentive for people to buy them, because I’m hearing this … “Nina – it’s not that we dont’ like your work, but there are so many good quality skins for free we dont’ need to buy anything to solve a problem”… and.. Our free work is much better than over half the skins for sale on snowcovered… but in reality, our new free skins are just nice looking css skins that we have converted and are quite lightweight and minimal in size but give our members the ability to start with something.

We use the active forums module for forums, but dont’ get that many posts, and not sure why, except that I think dnnskins.com really is the premier location to download skins and pick up some tips and information. That also reflects the articles we have online.. they are focussed towards the audience we have and as much as I’d love to put more online, I get a terrible dose of… ‘what do people want to hear’ … and difficulty at times in how to explain how things are done without a combination of video and audio.

I hope you have enjoyed this overview on this project which I really do love working with, and if I had I never had to worry about paying my bills, I think I’d dedicate much more time to this site, but you know the old story- you do what you can do with the time you have. I am very grateful I have a wonderful husband who understands why I’m awake at 2am in the morning sometimes.

Thanks for reading this – I’ll have our ecommerce sites overview next and if you love this site as much as I do please support it by voting for it in the competition.

Nina Meiers

http://www.xd.com.au