Beginning ASP.NET for Visual Studio 2015

Chapter 3Designing Your Web Pages

What you will learn in this chapter:

• How HTML and CSS work together
• Using CSS to add a design
• Adding and referencing CSS in your pages
• How to best manage styles

Code Downloads for this Chapter:

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/go/beginningaspnetforvisualstudio on the Download Code tab. The code is in the chapter 03 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

In many ways, modern websites are quite similar, regardless of their purpose. They tend to be functional, responsive, and attractive. Having a website that looks good is as important to getting and retaining visitors as the site's functionality. Very few sites can minimize the design elements and remain effective. However, all sites—regardless of content, design approach, and business needs—provide the same type of information to the user, who downloads one or more HTML documents, some styling information, and perhaps some imagery and even videos.

This chapter covers how all these aspects of a site come together, especially HTML and ­styling information, otherwise known as CSS. You won't become a design expert, but you will become familiar with CSS and learn how you can take advantage of Visual Studio tools to make working with CSS easier. You also work out the overall design of the sample application and review the strategies available to build a style dictionary.

HTML and CSS

Chapter 1 talked about HTML and explains ...