A Introduction

Introduction (1/6 on Webskin Template Authoring)

There are several different scenarios for a skinning whether it be implementing a new look and feel to an existing farcry website or creating a new farcry website from scratch or even just making some changes to part of a farcry website. All scenarios should follow a similar pattern to implementation.

We will look at just modifying the look and feel of a farcry website and not extending the core functionality as this is outside the scope of this manual. At Daemon we have just undergone a redesign of our website and it was my job to do the re-skinning so I will use the Daemon website as an example. I will take you step by step though the process I used for implementing the new skins, and show you the different stages I go through. We will look at re-skinning the homepage and then I will take you through skinning some teaser pages to reflect the new design and show some different techniques to overcome difficulties implementing lists.

Depending on your circumstances you will receive a bunch of html pages from your designer with pure HTML mark-up and some JavaScript and css style sheets or you may have done the designs your self. Whatever the case I will show you how to get these into the farcy project. There are some key issues that you or your designer should take into consideration when designing for a farcry project. There is a section on design considerations. I recommend that you should read this before going ahead and starting the mark-up templates.

Skinning can be a very easy process however there could be some difficult situations where you have to put your thinking cap on and figure out how you would implement the mark-up so a prerequisite to skinning is that you must have an understanding of the coldfusion programming language. If you follow these guidelines it will open up a whole world of knowledge and prepare you to tackle the most complex websites.

Read on in section B Design Considerations (2/6 on Webskin Template Authoring)