ASP.NET Design Templates

With the release of ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 ASP.NET was provided with a number of new features that were especially useful and attractive for designers. Master Pages made it possible to define the basic page structure in one central location and use it when creating individual pages. Themes and Skins were added to define or change, even drastically, the look of a website with just a few clicks without having to touch the content pages at all.

Microsoft wanted some design templates that showcase these features so they could be published to developers who wanted to give an attractive look to their ASP.NET projects. The templates had to be ready for use after download, easily integrated in existing projects and should be easily customizable.

Altogether we created four templates and each of them targeted a specific web site category: personal websites, small business sites as well as e-commerce and corporate sites. Each template had three themes, which gave them different looks. All of the templates were built with Master Pages that defined the structure of the website and they were fully HTML and CSS standards compliant. The templates were comprehensively documented and supported all modern browsers.

Microsoft published the templates on the American MSDN website. They were available for download in a brand new section at the time called  ASP.NET for Designers. Unfortunately the templates are not available anymore, but we dug up a blog entry by Scott Guthrie* that proves their existence. You can check out the screenshot gallery below to see how these templates looked. Ah, nostalgia... 

* A short note regarding Scott's blog post: in one comment there is a complaint that the templates were not standards compliant because they failed validation with the HTML Validator. This is correct. However, the failure had nothing to do with our templates which had been tested extensively, but it was caused by some of the default controls of ASP.NET which were producing non-standard HTML. We had no influence on this, but we reported the issues to Microsoft and some of them have been rectified in later releases. We are mentioning this point here as conformity with web standards has always been an important aspect of our work and it was no different when developing this project.