Engage: Direct is yet another design introduced for performance and variation. The skin design comes with three main layouts in five different colors choices. I designed the skin to accommodate large amounts of copy, with detail to the vertical scroll. The color options bring a casual feel to the site, and helps frame in the content being displayed. Engage: Direct uses subtle gradients, and soft color to give the overall site a warm, casual look and feel. This design is best suited for businesses that are content heavy, or smaller e-commerce sites.

As always I am interested in helping meet any further needs for custom skinning solutions. Feel free to ask any questions or comment on the skin using the support forums - feedback is always welcome! I am excited to offer more skins for the DotNetNuke community.

Engage is honored to have 2 sites chosen as finalists in the DNN OpenForce Community Choice Awards contest. Please cast your vote for one of our sites!

Here at Engage we’ve been doing DotNetNuke Training for well over 5 years now. Initially we provided training for existing clients, but over time we realized that we had the knowledge and a market to branch out and provide our training services on a larger scale. We even became the first, and so far the only, Official DotNetNuke Training provider.

Starting tomorrow (Tuesday 9/15/2009) we are conducting another round of our DotNetNuke Portal Admin class via our webinar instruction. Our webinar training provides some of our DNN classes over a three day period. This round is Tuesday through Thursday this week, from Noon to 2pm CST. If you’re interested in attending our Portal Admin class for further instruction in the art of DotNetNuke administration be sure to get signed up as there is still time.

If you are interested in other training information about DotNetNuke I’ve taken the time to write up a little more detail about the training that Engage provides for DotNetNuke, please check out the full blog post for that info.

Engage: Adaptive 2.0 (it’s the version, not web 2.0) was released last week as I wanted to take advantage of the improved skinning and parsing engine. Although the older version of Adaptive (Engage: Adaptive 1.0) works in 5.x (install as legacy skin), you’ll find Engage: Adaptive 2.0 with a more structurally sound with a few minor changes in its design and layout.

Engage: TRANSLUCENT is a clean, simple design fully optimized for site performance and customization. The skin would be ideal for any small business site, personal site, blog, or online portfolio. The inspiration for the design revolves around my belief in the importance of whitespace, or negative space, as well as a detailed eye on typography. This skin acts as a nice minimal support for bold content, or as a great springboard for those who are a little more DIY, but need a bit of a head start with the code.

Joe Brinkman wrote a positive (and in my biased opinion fair) review of “DotNetNuke 5: User’s Guide,” the book co-authored by Chris and me. The thing I was most excited about in Joe’s review was that he understood one of our key goals in writing this book – keep it simple. DotNetNuke can be an extremely powerful and useful tool for building websites.

So if you have been under a rock lately, you might not have heard about the upcoming St. Louis Day of DotNet event at the end of August, the 28th and 29th. I’ve been working the past few weeks to try to get some DotNetNuke sessions lined up, and so far things are coming along nicely! We’ve got at least 4 sessions currently, and I believe we’ll have probably 8 total sessions if myself and Cuong Dang get a couple more submissions in there later today.