Wednesday, August 13, 2008 by Cuong Dang
Custom Design for Login Page
Filed under: Tips & Tricks
When it comes to usability, many people often see issues in transforming their designs into a DotNetNuke-based web site. DotNetNuke built-in features might prevent people from taking control over their design mock-ups. A few examples are the login, register, and user profile pages. Also, if you’re using terms and privacy default content from the framework, you might run into layout issues. It uses the current skin design and applies to the control you want to load on the page.
A common example is when clicking on register, the site takes users to a registration page and the layout of it is the one that you’re currently viewing (previously), it just loads different content.
What if you want to include advertising banners or display call-outs for your site? For example, when user registers for an account, you want to show the banner advertising or the main sponsors of the site on different panes, you can achieve it by creating a new page.
Here is how we take back control. We create a new page for it.
Although your design provides a mechanism for adverting and you want them to appear across several pages (including the login and register pages for CPM-Cost Per Impression), you don’t have control over the layout of these pages by default. By creating new pages and specifying the appropriate control will help to accomplish this.
Here’s an example of setting up a custom login page:
- Create a new page, name it accordingly
- Add a new module called Account Login to the page
- Navigate to Admin, then select Site Settings
- Under Advanced Settings, expand Page Management (from here, you have the options to select custom Login Page or User Page)
- By default, it is set to Non-Specified, you can locate the new custom login page by selecting from the dropdown list.

With this approach, you can set different layout for the login or register page to include more content or branding tools for your web site. So when designing a web site for your next project, try to utilize the most of your web site real estate for any purposes.