coordination between Design and Development

Question

Background: I am developing a site in Asp.net 2.0 . Up until now i was handling both the design and development of the site. I used css for the design part. Now the company wants to outsource the design work to a web designer.

Question: How exactly are a designer and developer supposed to coordinate What specifications should i give to the web designer, Do i need to provide him with the aspx pages i have developed, does he also need to look at the code behind.

And how do i incorporate the designed pages in the existing aspx pages.

I would appreciate if someone who is experienced in this provides some insight

thanks.

Answer 1

How will the designer deliver their designs? Will they just provide the necessary graphic elements or will they deliver a valid HTML page? I would suggest you both agree on the DOM for the page and work from there.If they just provide graphics you have full control of the DOM.

The code behind model for .Net was supposed to help separate design and development but IMHO nothing has yet managed a perfect separation because you can't always make a 100% distinction.

Answer 2

Mayn people may not like my answer, but in my experience it works best if the designer gives you the stylesheet together with a template for the HTML/XML page. Then you incorporate your ASP.NET into that template.

You can see this as one of the few cases where function follows form ;-)

Answer 3

Make sure the designer doesn't put anything that he thinks is fancy and well animated. Many a times, it becomes a big pain to simulate such effects in ASP.net unless you are a pro with CSS or Javascript.

Coordination between designer and developer is a must according to me, so I would prefer to sit close to a designer till the base design of the page is finalized.