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Chapter 1: aesthNETics

it became apparent that they were only capable of making sites look good and had no real concept of

how to gather and analyze the data, management would not be happy. Making a site look good is by no

means enough. The point of this example, though, is to show that the interface design is important and

should not be ignored.

Evolving Expectations of Employers

In today’s rapidly evolving technological market, programmers are being asked more and more often to

become the ‘‘Renaissance men’’ of programming. This simply means clients and managers want these

programmers to be able to handle all aspects of a web project from requirements gathering to application

development to coordination of user testing to documentation. And, yes, even graphics and design.

How many job postings have you looked at that had a laundry list of requirements that doesn’t at least

suggest the company wants you to do it all? Programmers already ﬁnd it completely impossible to say

‘‘I don’t do database stuff; that is for the DBAs.’’ As time goes on, you will ﬁnd it increasingly hard

to say ‘‘I don’t do graphics; that is for the designers.’’

Even if that were not true, there are certainly other reasons to become a better web designer with regard

to your .NET applications. For one, it can make you stand out among your peers and coworkers. Say

that you are in a programming shop that does a lot of .NET web applications. Most of the programmers

are pretty efﬁcient at .NET. You are somewhere in the middle. You aren’t the best of the group, but you

certainly aren’t the worst either. How can you distinguish yourself? You could certainly put the time in

and become the best .NET developer in the group. But what else might you do?

Phillip Van Hooser, author of Willie’s Way: 6 Secrets for Wooing, Wowing, and Winning Customers and

Their Loyalty and an expert on leadership and customer service, has a simple and direct method for

distinguishing yourself from the crowd. He says that all you have to do is just the smallest bit more than

anyone else. You don’t have to make huge leaps of improvement over everyone else; you only have to do

slightly more. He explains that, if you are doing even slightly more than anyone else, you will be noticed

and people will remember you.

So what can you do to be even the smallest bit better than the peers in your group? If you are proﬁcient

at web design and layout, and certainly if you can navigate your way around graphics programs like

Adobe PhotoShop and create custom graphics, you will stand out. If you create applications that are

aesthetically stunning, while others are bland and uninspired, you will be remembered.

Creating a Consistent Look and Feel for Your

Website: aesthNETics Essentials

This book will attempt to outline some of the basic tools, primarily available in Visual Studio 2005, that

.NET developers can use to make their sites appearance at the same level of the coding behind them.

But if there is any hard-and-fast rule for web development, it is this: make the look and feel of your site

consistent. There is probably no bigger annoyance than going to a site and having the front page look

one way and then a content page look entirely different. This doesn’t mean that page layout can’t vary

from page to page. But it should be the developer’s goal to make the user feel that the site is consistent

throughout every page. Sure, at times, you will have to stretch the header to accommodate large data

tables. Or maybe you will have some sidebar links on some sections of the page and other links for other

pages, depending on where the user is on the site, to accommodate a large site with many different