Wrox - Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Design CSS Themes and Master Pages

Welcome to my first book, Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Design: CSS, Themes, and Master Pages. This book started off with the goal of telling the world about the business uses and advantages of themes. I had started developing them a bit and was getting further and further into them and kept thinking ‘‘this  is the coolest thing I have seen in a while’’. I began telling coworkers and colleagues about the different uses of themes and most of them had not even heard of themes at the time or, if they had, they had no real concept of what they were or how they could be used. I began making Code Camp presentations on themes, and the response was overwhelming. I decided this would be a really great topic for a book.

As I started creating my book submission, though, the topic expanded. Sure, Themes were amazing and their merits should be touted to the world. But is that enough? Meaning, is it enough just to show the basics of creating themes and how to apply them? Or is there a fundamental foundation of web design knowledge that needs to be incorporated into any theme design? Obviously, the latter began to become more and more the focus of the book.While themes are an important part of the concept I have coined as ‘‘aesthNETics,’’ which means the art of making powerful .NET pages look as amazing as the technology that drives them, they are only part of the equation. As an aesthNETics developer, you must include consideration of universal web standards like CSS, color, graphics, and accessibility, in the planning of any of your web projects. But more than that, you have to put .NET into the equation. This means using the tools of Visual Studio 2005 to enhance the look, feel, and consistency of the sites you develop. Tools such as menu controls, control adapters, Master Pages, and, yes, themes are critically important if you are to take aesthNETics seriously.

This book sort of chronicles my journey towards accessible web design. I learned web design using tables-based layout design. Anyone who started using HTML ten or more years ago, as I did, would probably say the same thing. There wasn’t much discussion of CSS and accessibility standards. This remained true until a year or so ago when I started slowly moving over to begin experimenting with CSS-for-structure design. When I started this book, I hadn’t totally made the switch, but by the time it was finished, I had. This is partially because of the research I did for the book but also because of the lessons learned from my own work experience at a State agency. If I had written this book a year ago, it probably would not have been as heavily laden with CSS. If I were to write it a couple of years from now, it probably wouldn’t be as open to tables for design in the earlier chapters as it is now. Its funny how time has a way of changing things.