DotNetNuke Tips for Skinning, CSS, and Design

I have been seeing quite a few references to Google talking about website speed lately. It seems as though Google is going to consider your websites speed in an effort to "make the web faster." (read article here) I like it.

I think there should be more of an emphasis on making the web more usable and speed is a major factor. This can seem like a challenge when it comes to DotNetNuke because so much of it is out of our hands (mostly because I am a designer and skinner, not a programmer).

Something that constantly comes up for me while working on a DotNetNuke Site as a designer, is making the site look good, being friendly toward the Search Engines and yet still keeping all of the dynamic capabilities of DNN, which is why we use it, instead of straight HTML, right? I have come across a few little tricks in which I will share in my next few posts.

One of my favorites is also very simple. It replaces the default title of a container. Doing this will remove a decent amount of the code bloat around the title, leaving it open to place directly into a header element of your choice. This also leaves it open to more easly target your title with CSS, without having other classes and elements getting in the way.

One of the challenges that is often faced when optimizing a DotNetNuke 4.x site, is all of the extra code bloat making it harder for the search engines to find your content that is important. Using the new Relocation Widget that comes with DotNetNuke 5.0 + allows us to overcome some of these challenges. The Relocation Widget will allow you to place your important content at the beginning of your code while moving the less important content (to the search engines) at the end.