Hi all,
I've written my ASP.NET app but the design looks poor, what is the best way for me to get a designer to work on the pages and css? I don't want to hand over my VS solution as my web designer wouldn't know where to start, can I hand over the .aspx pages and css files and expect him to manage with them?
Any advice welcome.
Thanks Jim
Make it as simple as possible for them to build (ie. put a build.bat in the same folder as the solution), set up any IIS configuration necessary, show them the URL and where the CSS files are, let them get on with it.
Designers are not devs, but they're not idiots either.
And they're going to have a much easier time with this than with trying to find a specific element in the DOM using Firebug (every designer's greatest love) without the code-behind to execute.
The biggest problem I find is many designers are not familiar with ASP.NET. Many of the things that we take for granted on our desktop like Visual Studio are not available to them. Other ASP.NET specific niceties like master pages, user controls and server controls.
So either find somebody who has this sort of experience or expect that you are going to have to provide them with additional resources such as your time and a test server, etc.
Alternatively they can develop pure HTML pages and you can translate them to ASP.NET.
I'd have a look at this: http://www.httrack.com/
Point it at your local web server, let it crawl and save the HTML, you can then just zip and send that to the designer. It's a free/easy option if your comfortable integrating the changes back in the solution, which usually isn't much of a problem.
Keep it simple. Tell them to click View Source, copy, paste into whatever design tool they are using. You can take their html and put it back into the aspx pages easily. It shouldn't be that difficult to replace their html controls with your existing asp controls.