Somewhere along the line, Nina Meiers thought that it would be a good idea to help those who wanted to learn about DotNetNuke skinning and how skins work.

Lots of people say skinning is easy and like anything once you learn it - it's not that hard to do.

But interestingly enough, those people who say it's easy - never really share their skins and ideas with the DotNetNuke community, so that brings about a couple of thoughts ... Is it that easy, or do people want to keep these secrets to themselves?

It could be a mix of both. Interpretation is different for everyone, but the best way to learn skinning is..

• Download a one of these free skins
• Open it up in Dreamweaver or whatever program you use to work with html
• Remove the skin tag refrences in the CSS up the top of the code, so you can see how the skin works and looks
• Make simple changes to it and ftp to your server or if you have it installed locally, edit in place

The biggest problem people have with skinning is they often try to do too many things at once and they end up with a mess they can't work themselves out of because they can't remember all the changes they made.

And this is not a DotNetNuke skinning issue, it's a common thing that many people fall into the trap of doing.

If you use FireFox - then install bugzilla - it will tell you about each section of a web page that has a skin you have problems with. 

Small changes and learning your way around DotNetNuke is the easiest way to grasp skinning.

Sometimes it's even worth investing a couple of skins that you like - but take care - just because it's for sale, doesn't mean it's any good.