Creating and altering themes in SharePoint is not for the faint of heart. Even with SharePoint Designer, you have to know what you’re doing to create a new look and feel for your site.

Doug Ware at Elumenotion has been working on a tool, Elumenotion SharePoint Skinner, that might be a viable alternative when trying to breath life into a default SharePoint look and feel.

SharePoint Skinner started out life as a homegrown theme tool. The newest version has the ability to export the theme as basic CSS, or save it as a .wsp file for use in WSS or MOSS. You’ll have to get your server admin to deploy these on the SharePoint server so that you can activate the output as a feature.

How hard is it to get setup Skinner? Here’s a quote from the documentation on the Elumenotion site:

“The only thing you need on your machine is Windows, the .Net 2.0 framework, and Internet Explorer (preferably IE 7 or later). Skinner uses wspbuilder to package the exported features, css files and images into a web solution package.”

Even if you don’t use it as a design tool, it’s a nice way to get a look at the underlying css of a site without using FireFox or the Explorer add-ins for discovering the presentation layer.

Elumenotion SharePoint Skinner is a free tool for download and it looks like Doug from the Elumenotion team is taking an active roll in answering all followup questions.