Making a skin...

They have: 140 posts

Joined: Jan 2003

I've been asked to design a custom skin for an Invision Board. I have never made a skin before, so I just have a few questions:

-What is the general price range of skins?
-How long do they take to make?
-Is it just replacing graphics, or is lots of HTML coding required
-Anything else that would be useful for me.

Thanks!

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Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

A skin is usually just the change of graphic colors, hacks are coding differences, sorry can't help you on the others. could be a tough one thou as there are a lot of free stuff out there for forums like invision board and phpbb etc

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

I don't know much about invision board but I did do all the graphics for twf here so I could tell you a little about that. You shouldn't have to do any HTML work at all - the board's administrator should look after the technical side of things. From what I understand the forum software should be set up completely to just let you put the graphics in the right place and that's it. There shouldn't be a whole lot of coding involved.

THe main work is the header area, which will vary depending on your project specs and what sort of materials you have to work with. It's not a huge area so it won't take as long as a full page design. For all the little red buttons you see around here, vbulletin provides the source files. You just have to change the colours and add other effects as you see fit. The only reason this takes a lot of time is because there are so many files to change. It's a rather tedious job. However, invisionboard might not have a similar default system so you may have to start from scratch.

Oh, here's a good link:

http://forums.ibskins.com/

I was just looking around to see what invisionaboard was like, as compared to vbulletin, so that should be helpful if you haven't been there already.

Can't tell you about pricing - I'd guess half as much as a regular page layout...

P.S. I hope this is somewhat helpful - I'm sorry if I'm completely off on this...

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