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If your website is driven by dynamic content, a Content Management System (CMS) is usually a good choice. While there are a lot of viable CMS options out there today, lately we have been more interested in exploring headless options (where the backend is separated from the frontend) which turned our attention to Payload CMS. Payload comes with many advantages, especially catered to developers, giving the team a modern stack (JavaScript, React, Node.js) with a lot of control without sacrificing performance, scalability, and the ability to customize to business needs.

When faced with building a modern website that is content-focused, Astro is an easy framework choice to make. The features and benefits of Astro make for a compelling option when balancing page performance, great SEO, reliability, and hosting cost considerations.

While we believe technology should never dictate your strategy, the reality of legacy or existing architecture often plays a major part in guiding the direction of designing cohesive software experiences. We build with intention with an aim for organizational growth, collaboration, and operational health, no matter the tech stack.

Websites are about a lot more than a beautiful design and polished branding, its main goals and strengths are communication. It’s not about how delightful an animation is or about using the most cutting edge fonts. It’s about connection, cohesion, and creating a digital space where your members, customers, or clients immediately understand who you are and what you offer.

Faith Enroll was designed to remove administrative stress and replace it with clarity, consistency, and care. It’s a streamlined enrollment platform that automates registration, payment collection, and communication so faith-based organizations can focus less on paperwork and more on purpose.

Leagues, clubs, and sports organizations don’t fail because of lack of passion. They struggle when logistics get in the way, tripping over manual registration, messy schedules, payment confusion, or last-minute communication chaos. Engage Sports is an all-in-one sports league management platform designed to keep operations tight, communication clear, and the focus where it belongs: on the game.

As a creative director, I spend a lot of time thinking about systems. Not just how they work but how they feel to use. Because whether you’re designing a brand, a website, or an association management platform, the truth is the same: if it’s clunky, people disengage, and if people disengage, growth dies very quickly.

Intuition is powerful, but insight is unstoppable. Great brands don't guess, they listen. They listen to how users move through their site, where resistance appears, what gets ignored, and what actually converts. Behind every smart decision is data composed from meaningful signals that reveal how people actually experience your brand.

Behind every seamless digital experience is an architecture you never notice, and that’s usually the point. When systems are thoughtfully designed, aligned, and optimized, they fade into the background and let your business shine. A failing infrastructure slows teams down, fractures customer experiences, and quietly can kill your growth.

Your business isn’t generic, so why should your software be? Off-the-shelf tools are designed for the average use case, often the broadest audience, the safest assumptions, and the lowest common denominator. While they might work for a few months, they eventually reveal their limits through clunky workflows, rigid systems, hidden risks, and growth bottlenecks you didn’t plan for.

Security isn’t just an IT concern, it’s a brand responsibility. We think about trust the same way we think about design: it’s invisible when done right and catastrophic when ignored. Your website, applications, and digital systems are more than just tools, they’re the front door of your business and that door needs to be reinforced.

Technology should never dictate your strategy, but rather support and express your needs. Custom software consulting isn’t about choosing tools, it’s more about shaping systems that reflect how your organization operates, collaborates, and grows. In 2026 the most successful businesses aren’t stacking software. They’re designing cohesive digital ecosystems.

What does it mean to have a great team? How to make good teams cross over into great territory? Working together is more than just doing the work.

When working within a CMS system that gives a lot of freedom, it is important to instill guardrails and best practices to keep designs and content consistent and usable. Using design and content best practices together is the key to making pages more compelling and overall effective.

At Engage, a handful of us get together once a week as a book club to read and discuss selected titles over the course of a couple months. We recently read The AI Con by Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender.

DNN Platform is a web application platform for .NET Framework which was started in late 2002 (under the name DotNetNuke). Engage has a long history of supporting and building on DNN and has created decades of connections with businesses that have built web-based solutions upon DNN. When you consider your organization’s investment in DNN, are you concerned about if you’re getting enough out of it? Let Engage’s experts help you explore what DNN is best for, what to expect from DNN in the future, and what other options you may want to consider.

Engage AMS is a suite of tools to manage events and memberships for associations and similar organizations. Its core differentiator is an architecture which encourages flexibility, allowing for both configuration and custom integrations to ensure each organization’s needs are met.

Over the years of delivering working software we have carefully carved a pathway to how we do our best work. Many of these habits and workflows resemble agile methodologies very closely, while others were more ideas that evolved from traditional agile approaches. Like any successful project, our approach is also expected to grow and iterate over time. The following is a representation of how we are currently working together to build software products.

We believe the best solutions come from working together. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do, including striving for full team discovery. We value diverse perspectives and open communication to achieve the best outcomes, and by working together to plan our work, we can deliver optimal solutions through shared understanding and clarity.

Our primary marketing website, engagesoftware.com, has been built upon the DNN Platform for more than a decade. After redesigning the content and flow of the site at the beginning of the year, we realized that we weren’t really using much of the functionality that DNN provided. In concert with some other work to move toward static sites, we started a small project to see what would happen if we migrated off of DNN and onto Astro. This is the story of that migration.

One big benefit of DNN is its theme architecture which allows for the separation of presentation and content, giving web designers the ability to develop the structure and look and feel of the website. DNN comes with a couple of themes out of the box to get you started, however these are rarely the right fit and are generic on purpose. There are also many commercial themes, with pre-made design concepts and templates, but their “one-size-fits-all” approach often fails to deliver a good experience for a specific audience or are too off-brand.

At Engage, we’ve been making websites since forever. With the resurgence of static HTML websites, we wanted to take a stroll down memory lane and think about all of the ways HTML files have been a part of our website journey through the years.

Custom software can be the difference between a solution that’s adequate and one that’s gamechanging. The upfront investment required for custom software versus off-the-shelf solutions necessitates a clear vision for how to get the best results from the team. Working with a team that is confident in methods to find and amplify value is a shortcut to delivering excellence.

Website personalization has a huge influence on how users experience your business. Tailoring content and appearance to individual users creates unique experiences for your site visitors and can foster increased engagement, higher conversion rates, longer site visits, and a better understanding of your loyal customer base.

Every custom software initiative is different. If it’s all been done already, just buy a solution off the shelf. If it deserves the investment of custom software, it will be solving unprecedented challenges. Cookie-cutter approaches to architecture, team makeup, or delivery methods can contribute to a lower-than-hoped-for return on investment. Instead, having the whole team explore options allows an optimal solution to emerge.

Anthony Overkamp, Creative Director, discusses how working with existing designs impacted the Account Center project with Consolidated Communications.

Associations, colleges, and even telecommunications providers often have member-facing portals which collect information from a wide variety of systems and allow those members to make changes to that information (e.g. by adding a new subscription). Ideally, all of the details of that change are immediately available to the member throughout the portal and any 3rd party they may be redirected to. For example, if their new subscription gives them access to a research platform, they expect to see a new link to that platform show up, and give them the access they paid for.

A business’s website is more than just an online presence, it’s a critical driver of growth, customer engagement, and brand reputation. Yet, many organizations overlook a vital component of their digital strategy: accessibility. An accessible website ensures that all users, including those with visual, auditory, cognitive, or motor impairments, can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with online content. Often viewed merely as a legal requirement, accessibility should instead be embraced as a strategic advantage that enhances inclusivity, expands audience reach, and strengthens overall impact.

Software teams typically include people with a wide variety of skills, including management, software architecture, visual design, UX design, data design, and business insights. A common “money-saving” approach is to have someone with management skills work closely with customers closest to the business goals in order to decide what should be done next, and then that management person will turn those ideas into tasks that the engineers and designers implement. However, the best teams understand that using designers and engineers only for implementation is a waste of their talents, and instead create a virtuous cycle of collaboration by bringing everyone to the table.

You know your product/business better than anyone else. Working directly with your design and development team helps them to design and build specific features and functionality around your exact needs. When your business needs change, having software built upon a flexible foundation can allow your product to quickly meet the challenge, whether that’s scaling, increased security, or an entirely new integration or product line. By starting with a custom approach to your business’ software, you have full control over the direction and impact of your vision.

How can you know how long a new initiative to build a custom software product will take? What’s a reasonable amount to plan to pay to get started turning your vision into technically excellent software that can go live and start producing value? Once an estimate of the effort has been created, how close should you expect the true cost to be?

User experience (UX) design is a human-first approach to a user’s interaction with a product, platform, or brand. Through research, data analysis, and testing, UX designers optimize experiences to be smooth, intuitive, and efficient, allowing users to complete their tasks with minimal frustration. By helping users achieve their goals more easily, the product or brand leaves a better impression and creates more satisfaction overall.

Five Layers of Building a Positive UX How do you ensure that your association’s website is providing a positive experience? The following article walks through five steps to building a site with an effective UX.

Engage Software explores using the process of Design Thinking to create an association website with a positive user experience.

The importance of culture is sometimes hard to explain, especially when you’re small; but it becomes quite obvious once you start to grow. Culture can change quickly; it only takes a few team members that do not fit the model to create a cultural change that quickly spreads. Culture has to be nurtured, and as a team we need to be relentless about hiring designers and developers that strengthen our culture and avoid those that don’t. Take a look at a few characteristics of people we look for at Engage and why:

Providing a better user experience (UX) is not just about making the site speedy or visually appealing – it is about making the site more enjoyable to use in order to drive conversations with consumers and promote your brand. As we begin a new year, many of the web design and development trends we see revolve around UX – from more effectively curating content, to making interactions clear and accessible to sprinkling in subtle animations. In no particular order, here are the top trends for 2016.

If you're like me, and get most current events via your Twitter feed or have spent some time looking up hilarious memes on Google Images, then you’ve experienced infinite scrolling—a web design technique in which content continually loads as a user scrolls down the page. Infinite scrolling is most commonly utilized on social networking sites such as Twitter and Tumblr, and websites like ESPN.com, where the ability to quickly scan information is a major component of the user experience.

Nothing is more frustrating than trying to read a company’s Web site on your phone and having to scroll up and down, zoom in and out, and strain your eyes until you find the right information–especially when you’re in a hurry.

Mobile First Responsive Web Design is a combination of philosophies and strategies that focus first on mobile devices, as well as user accessibility when creating a design. Websites and digital applications are getting more and more complex, and with that change, designers need to create experiences that work across the entire array of digital devices out there in the wild.

This year's Day of DotNetNuke in Charlotte, NC was my second time presenting at the event, and overall I think it was a success. It was a great event as always, with plenty of knowledge, appreciation, and laughs shared. The DNN Core members, sponsors, and of course the guys at Queen City User Group really pulled it off.

Join Brian, Jason, Oliver, and myself for this year's FREE Day of DotNetNuke in beautiful Charlotte, NC. Enjoy a full day of sessions packed with tips and techniques from DotNetNuke core team members, community members, and industry experts. This year's theme is "DotNetNuke Goes Social," and many of the session tracks will focus on the features of the latest release of the DotNetNuke application, version 6.2.

Earlier last week we released Engage: Nebula, a DotNetNuke 5 skin package. The skin is developed using CSS and designed around deep, dark color palettes, balanced space. The design is inspired by Star Wars: the Clone Wars, working off of the arts deep colors and stylized high contrast. The skin comes with 6 different color options, four layouts, and 6 containers. Each layout is carefully spaced to give the site even weight and balance, and when combined with the multiple containers, give your content a clear and custom way to shine. The skin package includes the original Photoshop file for easy customization, 6 unique colors, 4 layouts, and 6 containers. The force is strong with this one!

In case you might of missed it, earlier this week we released Engage: Prototype, a new DotNetNuke 5 skin package. The skin is developed using CSS and minimal images for better performance, and comes with six different color options, four layouts, and seven containers. Each layout is carefully spaced to give the site even weight and balance, and when combined with the multiple containers, give your content a clear and custom way to shine. The skin package also includes the original Photoshop file for easy customization.

Engage: Serene is our latest DotNetNuke 5 skin, whose design is based on simplicity, clean white space, and balance. The skin is designed using CSS and minimal images for the best performance, and comes with 6 different color options, four layouts, and 6 containers. Each layout is carefully spaced to give the site even weight and balance, and when combined with the multiple containers, gives your content a clear and custom way to shine. The skin package includes the original Photoshop file for easy customization, 6 unique colors, 4 layouts, and 6 containers.

Engage: Fresh Engage: Fresh is a new DotNetNuke 5 skin that emphasizes simplicity and flexibility. The skin is designed using CSS and minimal images for performance, and comes in 12 different colors. The skin package comes with the Photoshop design file for easy customization, 12 unique colors, and 7 containers. Fresh is designed to be so flexible that it could be applied to any website for a fresh, clean look.

Engage: Element is our latest commercial skin package release, including five bold color combinations, six unique containers, and three main layouts. Each layout choice comes with multiple panes designed to make your content shine whether you use all the panes together or just a few per page. Engage: Element is using the web standards approach, each layout is built with XHTML/CSS with some CSS3 enhancements (sorry IE users, you will not see text shadows). The skin itself has been cross-browser tested across most popular browsers. This skin is made to be flexible, easily accommodating any site small or large.

We decided to help spread the love to the DNN community by offering Engage: Zeen; a free skin package based on a Wordpress theme design created by WeFunction Design Agency especially for Smashing Magazine and their readers (Check it out). The theme was released free under a GPL, and open to modification and use for all types of projects without any restrictions. All they asked for in return was a link to the article to spread the word. The design simply rocks, and grew to be a popular favorite among Wordpress themes.

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: 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.

I’m proud to announce that we’ve released our second commercial skin, Engage: BEFITTING. The release of Engage:BEFITTING is also a pretty good time for me to introduce myself; so hello there. My name is Anthony Overkamp, and I am a designer here at Engage Software. This skin package is my first of hopefully many new designs to come to help provide clean, flexible design and presence on the web.