Skins

The user interface and graphical design inside all our web products is controlled by our unique Skins System. A Skin, in our web products, is nothing more than a single folder of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and images. Together, these control the complete look and feel of your product (except for those styles inside each module that only affect the module itself). The "Skins" folder inside our products holds several skins you can use to set the look-and-feel for your website. Using the dropdown Skins menu, or the Settings Module, you can easily choose a default skin for your system, and in so doing, apply a completely different font, colorset and layout to your web product.

Like Modules, a Skin is simply a folder of web code that sits inside the Skins folder in the software product. Your product comes with several free skins for you to choose from. The whole web product is built upon on this very simple architecture. This allows our product's look-and-feel to be quickly changed by way of a simple skin selection using our skins dropdown menu. It also allows all our products to be quickly updated and enhanced with new skins. Adding a skin, in our products, is simply a matter of dragging a skin folder into the product's "Skins" folder. Its that easy! You can even create your own skins, by copying one of ours, changing the colors and features inside the CSS using a text editor, naming its folder, and then copying this folder back into the Skins folder. Simply choose this new skin when it appears in the dropdown list at the top of your web page, and you have a design!

Standard Skins

All our web products come with a standard set of skins that is shared among all products. They are designed to provide very general color and layout designs to the product and not meant to encompass all possible layouts and designs you might need. We call these the Standard Skins, and they are listed below:

Antique
Black Room
Floral
GrayBox
PlainWhite
No Skin
WhitePacific

* Note: You can see what these look like, by exploring the "Live Demo" found inside each product area.

Custom Skins

At this time, we are not selling or providing additional skins. However, its very easy to create your own skin, if you know a little CSS. As mentioned above, to create a new skin, simply open the "Skins" folder in the product, and copy out a named skin folder to your desktop. You can open up any of the ".CSS" pages inside this folder, using a text editor like Notepad. Doing so, you can change the colors, formatting, and text and save them back to the page. When you are done, you will want to rename your skins folder to a new name. Be sure to change the name of your new skin folder as well in the "configuration.xml" page. After doing that, simply drag the new skin folder into the "Skins" folder inside the web product on your server. Refresh the site and it will indicate a new skin has been added by you and add it to the Skins dropdown menu system at the top of the page, automatically. Simply choose the new skin name from the list and press go, and your new site now has a new skin. You can even change the skins and test it live in your site, as you change the CSS file values. In this way, you can play with the design and change its design on the fly.

Please visit our Customization area for additional information on setting and customizing skins in our products.