Advice on Website Programming

Question

Possible Duplicate:
What should a developer know before building a public web site?

Hi All, Im about to start building a website. It will basically be a simple dating site. I am a .net programmer (strong vb) with vast experience in application programming including winforms and silverlight.

Now crossing over to website development im kind of a fish out of water in some respects. I will be doing it in asp.net. Im just wanting advice on tools i should use to design the layout of the pages etc? My real floor in experience will be CSS and page design.

The web designer i talked to at work said he uses a heap of different tools to develop his page layouts, it seemed like overkill.

Yeah so just some advice on what tools are needed to make a clean website on asp.net.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

IMO, stick with what you know. I personally am an "average" designer, so I actually leave the design up to http://99designs.com

I do my own CSS and all my own coding. My toolbox...

Visual Studio 2010 Pro
ReSharper 5
Zen Coding (new)
My Brain

That's about it. I can do everything I need with those tools... oh, and I do use a very minor amount of for the odd little "tweak" that I have to make in the original design.

Also, I would recommend using MVC instead of Web Forms. Web Forms "might" come more naturally to you since you already have some WinForms experience, but you'll benefit much more and have increased satisfaction with MVC.

Just my two cents.

Answer 2

I use -

1) Photoshop 2) Expression Web 3) Expression Web 3 SuperPreview 4) Visual Studio with Resharper 5) Third party controls 6) Ajax Control Toolkit 7) Web Deployment Project

Designer gives me PSD file; then I convert to Master page with CSS using Photoshop (to crop images and shadows) and Expression Web.

If the template does not involve complex CSS, I jump straight to visual studio and create theme in visual studio.

It's just my preference.