Collaboration platform for developers and designers

Question

Recently our newest web designer asked me why we use ASP.NET for our website. Reading through his question to the real one, I started thinking about it myself. Why are we using ASP.NET for web development?

The problem we find so far is colaboration between the design team and developers. Typically our designers create some snazzy cool look crayon laced web pages, then show them off for approval in all their glory. Once approved, the developers rip the HTML out and shove it in to ASP master and detail pages, and huzzah! out comes pretty website.

Since Dreamweaver doesn't play nice with Visual Studio, this is the same process for even small tweaks and changes. I would prefer to just write the backend and let the designers draw the pretty pictures and fancy CSS. Our current websites have plenty of reason to use ASP on nearly every page, so I can't do half in HTML, the other half in ASP.

I have no aversion to doing something else, another language, CMS platform, some other random buzzword, etc...

What are your experiences with this design situation? Are we doing it the hard way? Should we consider alternate platforms and languages? Are there any good, proven ways to allow designers to work on ASP (while still using Dreamweaver)?

Answer 1

Start learning Asp.net MVC as soon as possible. Designers will love you for that. :) And you'll be up to date with new development technologies that will also make your solutions much more robust and less complicated.

But otherwise. Designers should be able to read XHTML fluently. Learning asp.net semantics shouldn't be too hard. Then give then Visual Studio where they can manipulate content. As long as they know how asp.net web forms work things should be fine. They'll probably be able to do majority of things using just CSS. I know I can. Sometimes I do have to check resulting HTML, but it works.

Answer 2

I find your question very interesting because no matter what kind of technology the project uses the interfaces between the different roles will always cause some friction. I am not sure if there is a technological solution to this communication issue because the designer and developer speak literally different languages.

Depending on the skillset of your designers and developers an additional layer might help you out. I do not know how ASPX works but i am sure there will equivalents to the concepts of other technologies.

In case you have mainly static content which can be expressed in XML than you could provide the backend which delivers the content in XML with a defined Schema and your designers could describe the transformation in XHTML and CSS via XSLT. Given that your designer are capable using XHTML and CSS the addtional effort to learn XML and XSLT is not that huge. I find this solution much powerful than template languages which try to emulate the richness of the serverside scripting language in their own limited constructs. In case you have dynamic elements on the clientside like DHTML, AJAX or you name it you could define your own xml tags which are transformed to richer client side objects after the designer did their work. I guess the designer will understand the usage of these special tags and you provide the proper translation into client side objects.

I used this approach with some coworkes based on PHP. PHP was only the driver for the transformation. The content was assembled into xml with special tags which were transformed into XHTML and CSS via XSLT. Once the objects and the transformation for the different objects is defined you build up a library which can help to shorten the developement cycle of new pages of you webapplication. The benefit of the extra work is, that you designer can change the layout of the page without ever touching you server side code.

Maybe this helps.

Answer 3

Consider using either Expression Web or SharePoint Designer. The latter is now free.

Answer 4

I know you specify dreamweaver, but have you looked at Blend? It plays very nice with Visual Studio and is quite a nice app. to work with.

Answer 5

Aside from Wicket (a java web framework), I don't know of any framework or language that would allow designers to continue to work on the design once developers have started to add logic to it.

I would suggest two things though:

1. Use a MVC framework - ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails, Django, etc since this allows for far more separation of presentation and logic
2. Keep your presentation layer as stupid as possible and use helpers as much as possible or even better, put the logic in the domain objects. The view should only show or get data with absolutely no logic for processing data, this will keep the pages much more designer friendly.