...

[MuskyBill]

Ho Ho Ho....

[Kerry]

I'm lovin' it. Nicely done!

Merry Christmas all.

Kerry

[duber]

Yah what they all said.

 

Cooool!

[Carp]

Me likes too.

[crappiesteve]

Very nice indeed, to all involved.

 

Steve

[fishindevil]

we love it too,it puts me in the holiday spirit.....

[Bear]

awsome work on the Christmas skin

 

Merry Christmas to all

[Rattletrap2]

It sure does put you in a festive mood! Very nicely done!

[DebS]

I have to agree - love the new look! Much easier to read than the old colours. Wish we could keep it all year!

Edited December 11, 2006 by DebS

[Mike the Pike]

Very nice. I like it let it snow and send us ice Santa

[wuchikubo]

Really great, I had to do a double take just to make sure I was on the right page.

 

Great job!

[GbayGiant]

Nice work !

[bigfish1965]

I was wondering what room I was in. Wow its amazing.

Everything looks so festive!!

 

I'm just wondering how many hours does it take to transform a board into this? And how did she do it? Would you have to shut the entire board down to make all these changes. Would be interesting to know. Just carious.

 

 

dsn

Kim designs these skins through Photoshop. By keeping faithful to the original Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) design set out by James Matthias, she ensures that the skin will run perfectly on all Invision Power Boards (IPB).

Occasionally she will need to rewrite some of the original CSS coding to make the layouts work with more visually appealing graphics. I've done alot of graphics work and I can never come close to Kim's mastery of gradients. I've bought alot of skins from her and have yet to encounter an issue that we could not figure out.

THere are dozens (if not hundreds) of tiles, buttons, gradient backgrounds and such built by Kim. They all correspond to a specific CSS command that places the images into specific areas.

The actual board coding runs independant of the skin and works through PHP files which build the page into the graphics skin. All the posts etc., are stored in a MySQL database. The board files call the information as it is needed and the skin wraps around the information.

The forum has a built-in skin installer. Kim ships to me specially prepared skin files and image files which are uploaded through the IPB admin area. These files then build the necessary directories within the sites style_images directory. It all happens in less than 20 seconds.

Then I download the new style images folders onto my computerand make the edits I need to the header. Kim supplies the PSD files for Photoshop for the header. This particular header was editted by Kim for us in order to allow the banners to be kept in the header row. Then, in the admin area, I edit the navigation system, add in the java for the spell check and make file edits for the spell check display.

Finally I obtain Google adsense coding to match the skin colours, add in the stats coding, banner coding (whcih I get from TJ) and we're done.

99% of what I do is all cut and paste. The navigation coding is exactly the same on all skins and I can get away with this because of Kim's compliance with the original coding.

I used to work for Kim as a moderator on her old design site and it was there that I learned pretty much everything I know about graphics and how they work. I learned a valuable lesson there.....find someone who does fantastic work...work for them for free and you will be repaid a million times over in knowledge and experience. I chat with Kim and her hubby quite often through MSN and though we've never met, I consider them good friends. But that doesn't mean I would have brought their work here if I didn't think it was the best. She knows I can be nitpicky about stuff, but I won't come to her with a problem unless I am willing to help brainstorm a solution. Sometimes I'm even right! Okay...once actually....damned iframes!

So there is all my web secrets...I don't really know what I am doing, but I surround myself with people who do.