Many of us are probably not big fans of the default blue and gray DotNetNuke skins. Luckily, DotNetNuke introduced a new contemporary skin last week bundled in version 4.9 that helps to improve your viewing pleasure when you install a new instance.

At first glance, it looks much better than the blue and gray design. But the back-end also uses an improved approach, almost pure CSS layout. I still can't figure out why we are still using tables for layout. But hey, that's a completely different conversation. Let's talk about the new design.

Engage was approached by the team at DotNetNuke for some assistance in designing the new look and feel of the branding incorporated in the new skin. We received close to a blank canvas to start. The idea was to create something based on their initial mock-up that cleanly displays DotNetNuke information and information about other services available to the community. I agreed to spend some time and make it better.

After a few back-and-forth e-mail exchanges and conference calls, we finally came up with the design and handed it over to DotNetNuke team. We generated some HTML content for the top branding with a more search engine friendly approach and the team at DotNetNuke took care of putting it together for public.

From a design standpoint, for anybody who notices the reflection of the couple on the branding graphic doesn't look right, I already proposed an improved design which hopefully will make it to the next release. It's just a note to say to our clients and others that we do care about the finer details of the product.

I hope you enjoy the new design as much as we do and thanks to the DotNetNuke team for their great effort in putting out version 4.9!