WinCustomize gets an incredible amount of visitors each month, and a great many of them are new or first time users along with the regular community members.  Now whether you are a new member or a long time member, navigating through the galleries of WinCustomize might not be fully known by our users.

With that being said, I wanted to give an overview on how to navigate the galleries here on WinCustomize.  We have a wide range of galleries from wallpapers, cursors, WindowBlinds skins, and much more.  We also have categories for these galleries that can make finding what you are looking for a bit easier, but not everyone is aware of how to do this.

Gallery Navigation

Clicking the Gallery button in the main navigation header will take you to the gallery page.  Obviously, you can go directly to your gallery of choice by clicking the specific gallery on right, but we will get started in the main gallery page to show off some of its features.

At the top of this page we have more links to common pages like cursors, visual styles, etc.  Below that we have some other sections where users can get a better view of certain skins.

• Newest: This section will show the latest skins submitted to the public gallery.  A preview is shown of the latest six skins, and clicking the newest skins link will take you to a full gallery page showing the latest skins.
  
• Most Popular Skins: Here you will find the most popular skins by downloads.  At the top of this page you can sort by specific library, and from the last 30 days, the "hall of fame" or from yesterdays count.
  
• Recently Featured:  Skins are often featured on the front page of WinCustomize.  This section allows you to sort through the skins that have been featured.
  
• Recently Updated Skins:  Skins that were recently updated are displayed here.
  
• Top Skinners:  Clicking here will show you the top skinners in various categories, and you can select different viewing options from the menu at the top.
  
• Top Master Skins:   Master Skinners on WinCustomize can sell their skins.  This section shows off some of the most popular Master skins.

Navigating through Categories

One library that this will be very useful for is the ObjectDock gallery, so I will use this as the example, but the other galleries function the same way.  Under the main site navigation you will see the breadcrumb links.  You will see these in all the galleries on WinCustomize.

Next to each text link you will notice the arrow buttons.  Clicking one of these will open a menu allowing your a variety of sub-category choices depending on which you click.  Lets say you are looking in the ObjectDock gallery, and want to find a nice set of tabbed dock backgrounds for ObjectDock Plus.  Clicking the arrow next to "ObjectDock" will give me the menu seen below.

By selecting the "Tabbed Backgrounds" link, it will filter the gallery to show only tabbed backgrounds.

You don't have to stop there either.  You can filter it even more with settings like amount of downloads, newest, ratings, etc. 

Sorting Galleries

So we have gone through how to navigate through the different sub-categories in the gallery sections, and now we will cover just sorting through the galleries.  By default, when you enter any of the galleries on WinCustomize you will see the skins in order of the newest first.  This is great, but clicking the drop-down menu above the gallery will give you more sorting choices.

You can sort the galleries by:

• Downloads Overall
• Downloads Today
• Featured Skins
• Last Updated
• Newest Skins
• Skin Name
• Skin Rating

WindowBlinds Advanced Filters

With the addition of WindowBlinds 6 and Windows Vista skinning, the WindowBlinds gallery has an added filter that will show WB skins that are WindowBlinds 6 ready, Vista ready, or both.  Clicking one of these three links will filter the galleries appropriately.

You can also know which WindowBlinds skins are WB6 or Vista ready by looking for the icons as seen below.

Edit Displayed Libraries

On the right side navigation of WinCustomize, you will see links to some of the various galleries.  By clicking "edit" you can easily add or remove galleries from that list so you can see only the galleries you are interested in.

Simply select or deselect the check buttons for the gallery you want to change.

Conclusion

Hopefully this guide will help you navigate through WinCustomize more easily, and help you find the skins you are looking for.  If you still have questions or suggestions, please feel free to visit the forums.  More guides on other parts of WinCustomize will also be available soon.

Navigating WinCustomize Screencast

• Avatar =.zip .jpg 50px and .png 50px

• beatnik =.zip .bnSkin

• Bootskin =.zip .bootskin

• CursorXP/FX =.zip .curxptheme

• DesktopX Objects =.zip .dxpack

• DesktopX Themes =.zip .dxtheme .desktop

• DesktopX Widgets =.zip .exe

• Dream =.zip .dream

• Emoticons =.zip

• FireFox =.zip .jar

• Google Gadgets =.zip .gg

• Graphics =.zip .psd .png ... pictures files

• IconPackager =.zip .ip

• IM Goodies =.zip

• LiteStep =.zip .lsz

• Logons =.zip .logonxp

• LogonStudio Vista =.zip .logonvista

• Maxthon =.zip .m2s

• Misc. Icons =.zip .ico
  

• ObjectBar2 =.zip obpack

• ObjectDock =.zip .dockzip

• Progress Anims =.zip .wba

• Rainlendar =.zip

• RightClick =.zip

• Screen Savers =.zip .scr .exe

• ScreenShots =.zip .jpg

• Sidebar Gadgets =.zip .gadget

• Sidebar Styler =.zip .wsstyles

• Sound Schemes =.zip .soundpack

• Suites =.zip .suite

• SysMetrix =.zip .smx

• Toolbar Icons =.zip .wba

• WallPapers =.zip .jpg

• Widgets for SkinStudio =.zip .guiwidget

• WinAmp =.zip .wal .wsz

• WindowBlinds =.zip .wba

• WindowFX =.zip

• WinMedia =.zip .wmz

• Winstep =.zip

• Xion =.zip .xsf