Well, here's a series of tutorials on DNN skinning. Yeah, I know, there are hundreds of them, but I thought I'd throw in my two pennies worth as well.

The "Skinning From Scratch" series is basically a walkthrough for ASP.NET programmers. It will take you , step-by-step, through the process of creating a DNN skin directly as a .ascx file, rather than faffing about with the standard HTML and XML stuff you get with the development kit. I've also tried to point out a number of... features... you can expect to pop up when developing a skin that will look decent in other browsers than IE.

That said, if you're still interested, get stuck in:

Part 1: Front and Center