The DotNetNuke Experience Team has started second official DotNetNuke skinning contest.

Back In 2004 DotNetNuke introduced a powerful and flexible skinning engine built specifically with designers in mind.  With the launch of version 2.1.2 the first skinning contest which featured the work of many talented developers and designers. Many great looking skins were produced.  DotNetNuke 5 brings skinning to a new level with the introduction of a versionable manifest and new opportunties including built-in access to telerik controls (for licensed designers).

For this year’s contest the intentions were to promote the work of designers and support the DotNetNuke community. Designers are invited to submit their entries in the form of a contribution to the project. After the contest, submitted skins will be available for the community to download and use under the standard Community license .  Skins will be made available through a "gallery" which will provide ongoing recognition and links for contributing designers.

The contest entries will be evaluated in each of four categories by three highly qualified and unbiased judges. 

There is a collection of prizes for the winners and runners up in each category and the community favorite.  There will also be some random prizes awarded for community voting when the finalists have been selected!

Here are the Categories

1. Modern Business

This skin should be geared towards small to medium sized business.  It may contain a products page, client cases / references, about us, etc. It should have a clean, modern and professional look and feel. Also this skin should lend itself  to "adapt" to different business branding.

2. Personal

This skin should be geared towards a single person and may likely contain a blog or a portfolio or a community-like presentation. This would be a skin that has a highly-specialized personal design or layout.
It typically doesn’t lend itself to being modified by dropping a logo in.

3. Modern Web Standards

This skin should showcase the technical possibilities of DotNetNuke in this area.  Examples could be a tableless full CSS skin, Flexible/ Floating Design, SEO, mobile skin, accessibility or the use of a XHTML/CSS Framework etc. The main purpose would be educational, to show what's possible and how.

4. Think Outside the Box

This is the most open and creative category; we would like you to explore what's possible with DotNetNuke skinning. This could be in the way you navigate, a "different" design or the techniques used. Suggested techniques could be jQuery, Flash, Silverlight etc. The best thing to achieve here would be; "Wow, is that DotNetNuke?" Please note that even for this category you have to include all source files. This means you need to provide your FLA files for Flash for instance.