Visual Studio Web Design
I am using visual studio 2005 and building asp.net applications. Basically, only departmental reporting and data maintenance applications. They work and they look fine, but they don't look great. I don't have any other tools like Dreamweaver or Expression. Can anyone name any books or resources to create more usable web pages in Visual Studio.
Thank,
Billy
To be honest, the IDE does a pretty good job of doing design work. We're moving from our designers from Dreamweaver to Visual Studio 2008 and they definitely love the tools.
Don't get it wrong, some people just can't make a page look good, no matter what tool it is. I am one of those people. I can code all day, but if I need to piece the page together it will look like something to the right of the 90s.
I would recommend looking for some HTML templates and adapting them to your product. There are open source templates and ones that you can buy for relatively little money.
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I always try to write code myself and not use design tools.
There are many possibilities you can do with CSS and HTML, and it is important to understand how these pieces fit together.
If you are looking for some good examples of site design, I recommend checking out http://csszengarden.com
They have many different designs based on the same HTML file, so it gives you a lot of perspective on the possibilities of CSS.
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The first thing you need to do is learn CSS. You can't count on style if you don't know the technology used to do it. I would start with HTML-Dog tutorials and from there. More importantly, it actually has a good sense of design and it is much more difficult.
Design skills have nothing to do with Dreamweaver. To build a good sense of design, you need to start introspectively evaluating the sites you visit. Think about why everything looks good or bad. Paired with your CSS knowledge, when you see something that looks cool, think about how you will implement it. If you don't know, the source code is right there, so it will take a while to figure it out.
I've been doing this for about 5 years or so and I still suck coming up with new projects. (although, I'm better at this when I started.) What I do when I start a site is ripping the main design out of another place and making it my own. For asp, I use devexpress controls which have a lot of great themes, so usually I just end up making the controls look bigger to the rest of the site.
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