Hi folks, I'm a DNN rookie who's trying to help my aunt with a legacy municipal community site she contributes to. One thing we'd like to do is change the existing skin on the site, so I was just wondering is there a tool that lets you change live skins on the site? If not is there a "best practices" set of tools that people use for changing skins? I have Dreamweaver, a text editor and a small amount of HTML/Javascript knowledge at my disposal, and that's about it.

Thanks all and wish me luck!

You can change skins live. You need to buy another skin then upload through the host settings --> extensions. Follow the steps through the set-up. The website will most likely need re-formating as the new skin layout will be different. If you are familiar with DNN this is an easy process. Go to layout view and move things around from there. Good luck

Generally, you would create a skin separately, or acquire one. Then, you use the DotNetNuke Host, Extensions page to install the new skin on your site.

Next, you can switch the site's skin by editing the skin setting in the Admin, Site Settings page. If there are any pages with separately specified skins and containers (on each page's Settings), you'll have to visit those pages and make the changes one by one.

If it's possible, I would recommend that you grab a copy of the site and install it locally or in a development environment. Then, you can install the skin, fix all of the pages, make any adjustments that are needed and make them all offline. When you are happy with the new site's skin, you can then move the local site back to production. That's the best way to do it, as you don't want to be playing on the live site.

Now ... developing a skin is something that you can do, and we have a lot of tutorials. There are also large numbers of free and commercial skins that you can get and adapt to your site.

I definitely see the benefits of running the site locally for testing purposes, unfortunately I'm on a Mac so I don't think that's possible. Thanks for the advice!

Perhaps you can create a second portal on the DotNetNuke installation, and experiment with the new skin on it. That will not affect the main site until you are ready.