web design and the .net 2.0 framework
benefits of the .net framework to site architecture
The asp.net 2.0 includes a number of components that give a large degree of flexibility in how you structure your web application. This is true even from a non-development standpoint. At Station Four we prefer to code new sites using the .net framework. This has the following advantages:
- Limits repeated markup, allows for easy and quick changes to global elements
- Allow for future backend development without worrying about the effect of changing the web address for marketing and search engines.
- Cleaner Markup and modularization of code allows others working on the site to find what they're looking for easier.
components of .net framework
master pages
Master pages act as templates. Each web page (aspx) inherits a master page which defines the look and feel you want for a subset of pages allowing us to make changes to, for example, the main navigation quickly and easily.
themes
A theme is collection of styles and settings that is applied to individual pages. Using CSS techniques we can use a single master page and multiple themes to have variations of similar pages such as two-column or three-column versions.
user-controls
User controls allow us to abstract out reusable code snippets such as menus, footers, or tables so that even across multiple master pages or aspx pages we can reduce the amount of duplicate code. Since we separate the appearance and style from the markup we can style the code snippet in the user control differently based on the theme.