Congratulations to Fowles Auction Group who have recently had a couple of name changes and website updates.

I like working on projects that are a little different, so when Manheimfowles contacted me and asked about their new site design, I thought it would be a great opportunity to show how DotNetNuke skins can be that little bit different.  I was not involved in the design of the site, that was done by the marketing team.

This site went through a couple of updates in it's journey mainly because of the design needing to be massaged a bit to make the information fit in a seamless and practical way.  There were some compromises, but overall, very close to the original design.

Using the http://www.snapsis.com CSS based menu, it shows the diversity of this application and how we don't have to have solpart all the way.  The horizontal and vertical menus and sub pages work well together and some modifications were required to make the longer named menu items display correctly. It's one of the first sites we've done for a corporate that has embraced the 1024 pixel wide design as the default and there were some small challenges to fit the menu names completely across the design.

We had to work every pixel we had to fit the long names and the menu items and to conform to the requirements of the marketing team where branding and look and feel was to be carried through every department.

The site was built on the XD servers, and delivered as a complete portal to be attached by them on their servers. This method of portal delivery is becoming popular as we are able to ensure the portal has been optimised, unwanted modules deleted, PageBlasted for peak performance and taking the pressure off the company in getting it right.  We know how to get DotNetNuke portals deployed and optimised and designed from and administration point of view, in a manageable way.

New Branding and look for the
Fowles Carpet and Timber website

New Logo and colours

Front Page

Sub Pages

I'd like to say Thank You to the ManheimFowles Group for their vote of confidence in working with XD Design and while we had some interesting moments along the way, overall, this has been not only an exciting project, but another vote of confidence for using the DotNetNuke framework.

Another big Thank You to John Mitchell from Snapsis. He is one of the DotNetNuke stars who has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to making your DotNetNuke site a fast one, a search engine compliant one and has some great ideas that make your sites a pleasure to work with.

I will be putting more information online on my website - http://www.xd.com.au/ after I have finished updating SkinCovered.com">http://www.SkinCovered.com

Cheers

Nina Meiers