Under the covers the new WinCustomize.com is a completely new site. Rewritten in ASP.NET, the new site boasts tons of new features. Of course, it'll take some weeks to sqeeze out all the bugs. And we will be tweaking the layouts and so far this blue look we have is the only theme we have available. But in time, the site will become richer and neater looking but it'll take time.
But the new site does contain tons of new features that we think people will really appreciate. Overall, our goal has been to allow more people to actively participate in the skinning community. The old WinCustomize.com only recognized one kind of contribution: Skin authors. People who made skins, themes, icons, or wallpapers.
The new WinCustomize now recognizes other types of contributors - tutorial writers, article writers, and advocates.
Article Writers. You can write articles on OS Customization or Personal Computing and the site will monitor how many readers it gets and how many points it gets as a result. The top articles and top authors will then be listed throughout the site. This will be expanded on as we get other parts of the site ironed out. You do have to have a personal site on WinCustomize.com to create articles on WinCustomize. Articles also get syndicated over to JoeUser.com (in fact, this article will be on JoeUser.com too). You can write about anything else you want but those articles will only be displayed on your personal site and on JoeUser.com.
Tutorial Writers. How do you make good icons? What are some tricks to making nice UI graphics? What's involved in making a WindowBlinds visual style? This comes in the realm of tutorials. What's nice about tutorials is that based on what category they're in, they will show up in the right bar on the particular skin library. For instance, write a WindowBlinds tutorial and everyone browsing the WindowBlinds skin library will see that tutorial on the right.
Advocates. Advocates is a new concept. The idea is to acknowledge users who go out and try to spread the word of skinning/customization out onto other sites. People who highlight other people's work and then tell others about it. For instance, if I find a skin I like a lot, I can "recommend" it. It then shows up on my recommended page on my personal site. From there, I can then give a link out onto other sites of a particular recommended skin such as Moose which I recommended. Now, every time someone clicks on that link I get an advocacy point. The skin author also gets a point (for creating the skin). I posted the skin over a Neowin with that link and if you look here you can actually see how many people came from Neowin. Only 27 but that's 27 more points I got.
If you click on the Popular tab. You can see the top advocates for the month and the top advocates of all time. The Hall of fame, btw, starts with the launch of WinCustomize 2K5 (December 7, 2004) to give everyone a fresh start.
Popular Tab. We still have to do some tweaking here so that it's more clear what time frame a given top list came from (last 30 days or since December 7, 2004). Plus some counts are based on subscriber downloads and not total downloads. Subscriber downloads are easier to verify and less prone to manipulation. So the top download counts may seem low. Obviously we need to make it more clear when we're using total downloads and when we're using subscriber downloads. 
If you click on the "more" at the bottom it becomes more clear usually.
But you can see the new areas we're tracking. So it opens the door for far more ways to contribute to the site.
The Video.
If you have Windows Media Player 9 or later, you can get a video tour of the entire site that shows off a lot more good stuff.
[VIDEO TOUR HERE]
