Dynamik Website Builder is quite a mature WordPress Theme with regard to code and feature refinements and has been a solid web design tool for some time now. But there has always been a very important missing element that, I believe, has kept it from being as useful and user-friendly as it could be. And before I beat around the bush anymore let me start by getting straight to the point: Dynamik Skins!
We’ve been playing around with these “Skins” all the way back to 2009 with my original “Frugal Theme”. Essentially I just took advantage of the robust Import/Export functionality of my themes and used these features to allow users to design, transfer and share their WP site creations quickly and easily. But one major missing element (and one thing that really kept me from delving deeper into Skin design) was the lack of compartmentalization of Skins and the limiting factors involved.
A few months ago I decided to finally hit this problem head on and Dynamik 1.6 was born. With version 1.6 you now have fully compartmentalized and more flexible Skins that have a more theme-like feel to them. This inspired me to take another hard look at Dynamik Skin design and after several weeks of fiddling around I decided to get to work.
A Nice Start, But Just The Beginning…
So after several more weeks of serious Dynamik Skin development I came up with eight “Official” Cobalt Apps Dynamik Skins that are now available for free to all Dynamik members through your “My Account” page. These are Skins which are “Premium” in nature in that I took the time to refine them to a level I would consider Premium, but they’re also not totally decked out, nor are they meant to be.
The purpose of these Skins and the ones which will follow over the coming weeks and months is to provide a solid starting point for your designs. Since Dynamik is and will always be geared toward the Do-It-Yourselfer I felt it was critically important to design these Skins with that in mind.
But The Important Point Is This…
So yes, it’s exciting news to know that these high quality Dynamik Skins are now available and that I will continue to work hard to provide you with more to come. Yet I want the emphasis to be on the fact that these Skins are really meant to be planted among our members with the goal of many more freely available designs sprouting up around the Cobalt Apps community. My hope is that these Skins will provide a solid starting point for our members to take and run with, creating their own versions and then sharing them with the rest of us.
Other Notable Benefits…
Another notable benefit to these Skins is that they allow me to provide real-world examples of how to do different things with Dynamik. For example, I occasionally get questions regarding the compatibility of WooCommerce with Dynamik. Now, with the ProductPress Skin, the member in question can just checkout the demo site and then download and Import that Skin and see how it’s done.
Or let’s say you wanted to know how you can create those uber-slick looking fixed backgrounds that seem to give layers to your homepage. In this case I’d point out the EnterprisePress Skin as a simple way to reverse-engineer the process. So for me, Skins are a great teaching tool and one that is much more stimulating than some of the more traditional methods.
The Bottom Line
I’m really happy with the way these eight initial Dynamik Skins turned out and am excited to be able to share them with our amazing community of members. And I look forward to seeing various versions of these Skins outlining the content of many sites in the future. But much more than this I’m excited to see the focus on Skins increase, with both free and premium solutions cropping up as our members realize the huge benefits of such resources.
So here’s to a fresh new focus on Dynamik, with Skins leading the way to a more productive and enjoyable Dynamik experience! Dynamik has always been a powerful and flexible web design tool, but from the past few weeks of Skin development I realize now, more than ever, that Skins are a critical factor in the full realization of what Dynamik has to offer.
Follow & Share:
