DotNetNuke Tips for Skinning, CSS, and Design

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Thursday, June 30, 2011 10:55 AM 

Be forewarned, I WILL be throwing out some link lovin’ in this post because I owe a lot of thanks for all of this.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011 marked a brand new chapter in my professional and personal life. I started working at Arrow Consulting and Designs!

Way Back When

A little backstory on me… I used to drive trains; I was a conductor and then engineer at CSX Transportation for 8 years. I decided there was more to life than working on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with only a 2 hour notice. Not fun. So, I decided to do the next closest thing, web design…

Hello DotNetNuke

I started for a year hacking away at learning HTML. I then got introduced by a friend and fellow band-mate, Angel Rojas of Datacorps Technology Solutions, to my first boss in the tech industry. Scott Michie was the owner of a small website company, now called ArchiTech Software and Web Solutions and was looking for someone he could teach to help build his business. He introduced this thing to me called DotNetNuke. (If you’ve never heard of it, what are you doing on this site??) I went along learning about this new amazing application that would, well, literally change my life. And, I owe a lot of thanks to Scott for all that he taught me over those years. My job was pretty straight-forward; design a site, convert it to HTML and add some content.

Fast forward about 2 1/2 years and in comes this Internet Marketing guy, David Pavlicko, to the business. the first thing he said to me, even before “Hello”, was “Can we get rid of these tables?” Challenge accepted! I have dedicated the last few years of my web development life to making my skinning files as clean as they could possibly be. Meaning, separating content from design, or, separating HTML from CSS. I have also enjoyed greatly having the opportunity to share this knowledge through my blog, user group meetings, Code Camps and the Day of DotNetNuke.

There is a DotNetNuke Community?

Speaking of the Day of DNN, the original Day of DotNetNuke Tampa in 2009 was a pivotal time in my career. We got a newsletter from the Orlando DotNetNuke User Group talking about a new type of code camp geared specifically toward DotNetNuke. Before this, I didn’t even realize there was a community out there, much less, one that wanted to help others. The newsletter asked for anyone that was willing to design and skin the logo and website. Again, challenge accepted! Scott Michie did most of the work on the logo and I took it all from there.

This got me introduced to the so-called “Mighty Will Strohl”, who incidentally has a great skin on his site – (scroll to the very bottom to see why I think it’s great :) Because of him, I joined Twitter and the DotNetNuke community as a whole. He must have slipped me some of that kool-aid when I wasn’t looking, because I have become quite passionate about promoting how great DotNetNuke is, as well! Through all of the networking that Will walked me through I was able to meet many other great people who love DotNetNuke (okay, not as much as Will does) and eventually my new boss, Ryan Morgan!

The New Gig

I have been a fan of Ryan for quite a while. He did some custom module work for us, I have seen him at many code camps and other DNN related networking events and, the fact that he is a DotNetNuke author, isn’t too shabby, either. When he contacted about the possibility of coming to work for Arrow Designs, I jumped at the opportunity. Arrow is a full service Microsoft business that uses .Net, Silverlight, Sharepoint, and DotNetNuke (of course) and works with many larger, enterprise-level clients. I saw this as the next logical step in my career.

I brought up my involvement in the DotNetNuke community and social networking and wanted to make sure that I was still going to be able to stay as involved as I had been previously. Ryan and Raul Rodila, Arrow’s other managing partner, assured me that was part of the reason for bringing me on. So, you can expect to start seeing more from Arrow on the social side in the coming months.

Moving Forward

And, how does this affect my personal life? I am moving from Tampa to West Palm Beach, FL! I’m leaving my church, Dover Advent Christian Church, where I have been very involved over the past 7 years as well as well as both my family and my wife’s family. I am are excited, though, to get to start a new life and adventure with my wife, Shannon, and our 2 1/2 year old son, Lucas (his site www.lucaswilliams.com – and, of course, it’s DNN)

Well, that pretty much gets you up to speed on my life over the past few years. As I was writing this post, I realized that I haven’t blogged much lately. That is something I will be sure to get back into.

Thanks for reading and, I hope to see you at DotNetNuke World 2011 where I will be presenting 2 sessions, Advanced Skinning for DotNetNuke and Advanced jQuery for DotNetNuke!

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