I've recently decided to create a web app to host some algorithms - I normally just create them without care for UI. However this time I need to dive deep into UI. I'm familiar with bootstrap, css, asp.net and have made a good start.
I'm finding it very difficult to deal with asp.net controls in the design view and having too much trouble trying to achieve simple tasks such as moving controls to different areas of the webpage. When I have two textboxes the design view forces one on top of the other leaving me so confused. Then when I try to move my bootstrap button it randomly creates paragraphs and refuses to move the button!
I'm looking for some genuine sincere advise on how I would deal with the design view on asp.net when moving controls and what the best techniques are. Also advice on how to make a modern UI, best techniques (perhaps bootstrap mentions) etc...
I am creating a fairly simple data display app in asp.net (visual studio 2015) - (most of the algorithm complexity is going to be behind the scenes and nothing to do with UI). Comprehensive and detailed advice would be really appreciated. Specifically modern good looking UI in relation to data grids, textboxes for user input (as parameters), dropdowns - you know the typical data app.
I'm sure this will be greatly helpful to many others as well!
Yeah, as I web designer who has had to work with asp.net in the past I completely feel your pain. It's not easy to get a modern look mostly because asp.net isn't a modern tool and kind of has a visual vocabulary all its own.
That said, I found I could get decent results by sticking as close to CSS based solutions as I possibly could. You can see some of those results in the following links:
http://www.design-experiments.com/
http://www.troyjnorris.com/shoppingcart/
I found that a minimalist approach tends to come with the best results.
A good process to follow:
- Build what you want to build.
- Add container divs to make selecting elements easier around your controls. This will greatly improve your ability to position elements the way you want.
- Use your browser inspector to figure out the auto generated element names as they appear on the screen. Getting good selectors is half the battle in CSS.
- Rip out the styling you don't like. Standard reset style sheets won't do here. You'll have to build your own to zero everything out on the elements you want to style so you're not fighting the out of the box look of the controls. Again you have to rely heavly on your inspector in a web browser to see what styles everything is inheriting.
- Use google fonts to define visual style of the page.
- Stick to mostly black or white backgrounds.
- Bootstrap is helpful for a responsive grid, but won't do much good attempting to style most of the elements on a page as they're not meant for that.
- As you might have noticed in the examples above the visual interest comes from elements that are unrelated to the asp.net structure and limitations. So have something like that, even a background image or some paralax so it feels like something is going on on the page.
Hope that helps.
I'm a beginner with MVC4. Is it worth spending time on learning how the site.css is structured? How can I render HTML from my views that the site.css picks up?
Or would it be easier for me to just make my own CSS and use my own HTML for all my views and totally ditch all the pre-generated layouts.
What MVC features do I miss out on if I decide to go all with my own CSS and HTML coding? Or is it a bad idea to start with?
CSS only controls how the page appears, you will not lose any MVC features if you decide to build your own CSS.
You might lose some features when you change the HTML, if you're not paying attention. For example, the validation summary won't be rendered if you get rid of the #Html.ValidationSummary() statement from your HTML file.
Since you are a beginner, I would advise editing the current site.css with your own styles...no need to create a new one..by adding and changing the existing one, you can see how it is working.
And once you change it enough, it will have become your own version.
Yes you certainly should use your own HTML and CSS, rather than trying to make existing samples work for you. It is a template, a guide, to give you an example project and I think it should be used just for that.
Create your basic HTML markup and look into how you can use the html helpers that MVC provide in your markup. Doing it this way we give you a much greater understand of how the MVC framework works.
There are plenty of good examples out there, don't worry if they are MVC3, they are still relevant. Here are a couple of links to get you started.
MVC4 Sample
MVC3 Music Store
What framework is more friendly and open towards css customisation? How ugly will it get? Ideally they should look and behave exactly like their kendo counterparts.
(To give some context: I have to choose between the two frameworks and maybe later
will hire a webdesigner to mimick Kendo's web UI look & feel.)
As an example: Kendo's calendar picker UI
http://demos.kendoui.com/web/calendar/index.html
That date picker seems pretty standard fair. Dojo's picker (the one I am most familiar with) will handle it.
The skinning will be the trickier part. Dojo has good theme support, so you should be in good shape there, but it will still require a lot of effort to get things looking the way you want. (Having a web designer will be a big help).
What I would do if I were you is look at your project, and see what widgets are must have, then make sure whatever toolkit you go with has them.
I would be surprised if any prime-time JS framework didn't include skinning support that would handle the look and feel you want to add. Still, you are going to have to dig into that support and learn it, and end up dealing with a lot of pretty involved layout and CSS.
It's still in its early stages, but you can try playing with the theme editor at http://maqetta.org to customize Dojo's Claro theme.
I have to present a prototype of an web app in the following days to one of my clients, the thing is I'm not so good at CSS and worst of all I'm almost never happy with the results I get.
Coding the business logic poses no challenge to me, the UI design however takes more than 80% of my time. I don't need nothing breathtaking, just a clean, nice and presentable environment, an example:
This is a recurring problem I've been having, I wish web UI development could have a less naked default style, an approach similar to Visual Studio or iPhone SDK would be very useful to me.
The above mockup created with Balsamiq Mockups is a great example, all the most common "components" are available to use, and best of all: there is only one good-looking style to choose from.
Is there something like this for the web? A neutral yet nice CSS or Javascript UI framework?
Options so far:
Bootstrap
Qooxdoo
jQuery UI
jQuery Tools
MochaUI
Ext JS
Yahoo! User Interface Library
BlueTrip
BluePrint
Uki (Demo)
Napkee
YAML
Baseline
iPlotz
Sproutcore
ForeUI
I'm interested in knowing if there are any CSS-only UI frameworks.
I found this page with a very nice list of Web UI Libraries, but most of them (at least the good ones) seem to be specific to Java, are there any equally good alternatives in pure CSS or JS?
PS: I'm not interested in AJAX, effects, behaviors and so on... my main (only) concern is style.
Thanks for all the suggestions everyone!
After a very careful consideration of all the UI libraries suggested, I've come to the conclusion that ExtJS and Qooxdoo are the ones that most closely fit my needs. jQuery UI seems promising but only offers a reduced amount of elements.
As far as CSS-only libraries go I've found BlueTrip / BluePrint and the themes suggested by tambler to be the best. Aside from that, Flex and Napkee also seem to be worth exploring.
Time to learn ExtJS now! =)
A combination of 960gs for layout and jQuery-UI for styling is probably what you are after.
You could also consider the blueprint CSS framework instead of 960gs.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned:
http://www.extjs.com/
Its a commercial js frameworks, but pretty affordable, and makes putting together a nice UI a breeze. There's a much more complete set of elements then jqueryui, and its designed to make an entire app. I've only played with it a little, but I really love it so far. Free for personal use.
If you really want to get a feel for a complete UI developed with EXT, try this url:
http://docs.sencha.com/extjs/4.2.1/extjs-build/examples/feed-viewer/feed-viewer.html
What about using dojo and dijit?
Dijit is a fast way to create widgets and elements. It also comes with 3 default themes which are easy to modify.
A good list of different widgets here
Pair up with someone who specializes in UI design.
If you are better at dealing with business logic, your time is better off spent exclusively coding business logic so you can master it. This will require you to learn how to interface with someone else who excels at presentation. (xml and json are common means)
Business logic and presentation are very different. Designing a system that not only looks good, but is intuitive and easy to use is quite difficult. Equally as difficult and time-consuming as establishing the inner workings of a complex application.
A good interface is not as simple as including a css framework.
I consider myself to be a more 'creative' programmer who does excel in presentation. I happened to be lucky enough to cross path's with someone who was, first of all... very motivated, and second of all very good at 'business logic'. He had a lot more experience planning and implementing complex systems, while I mainly have been focusing on interface design.
If you are more productive doing system architecture, planning, developing, whatever... you should push yourself in that direction. While solo development projects can be rather fulfilling, I view it as inefficient. It is very rare that someone possess skills to develop top-level applications solo.
The challenge is finding someone who you work well with.
Check out Google Web Toolkit. It has a pretty clean default look. They have examples . In particular, their Showcase example demonstrates all of the available widgets and the css styling used to achieve the look.
There are a few frameworks aimed at (G)UI Design; Qooxdoo, JQuery UI and MochaUI being a few of them (although the last is more a proof-of-concept than a usable framework). These frameworks usually offer a variety of JS-powered elements (form elements, such as input fields and submit buttons, but other elements like tabs as well). However, it will still be up to you to position these elements, and perhaps style them, to your liking.
Perhaps familiarizing yourself with a CSS framework (such as 960GS) might complement the above JS UI Frameworks.
(As a personal disclaimer; I have very little experience with any of the frameworks mentioned above. But I'm sure either Google or SO can provide answers I can't.)
This won't help you out for your current project, but it's worth considering for future projects. After spending many years creating GUI applications in HTML 4 and constantly wrestling against the limitations of CSS and HTML, I thought I'd try out Adobe Flex. What an improvement!
Rather than faking a tabbed page control or data grid, with Flex or Silverlight, your markup can simply specify a tabbed page control or data grid. And the frameworks come with default styles that are boring but not at all bad. I'm not saying these completely replace HTML, but if you need widgets and GUI layout, I believe they're a much better alternative.
You might consider browsing the following site:
http://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-skins
There are several "Administrative" themes available for purchase here that may suit your needs.
wireframe mockups like that are a brilliant way to start.
Having used most of the UI framewroks discussed here, I'd liek to steer you towards jQueryUi for the following reasons:
jQueryUI CSS framework takes care of the consistent and cool looking CSS for you (it's really easy - just make some markup and apply the classes)
jQueryUI has tabcontrol, and heaps on neat quick easy ways to style forms.
If you are targeting modern, non IE, browsers, then you should check out Sproutcore. For mockups I use mockingbird.
A relatively new PHP framework specifically designed for development of UI-focused software. Elements you have here including Tabs, Filters and Grids are included and will take you about 20 lines of code to implement.
http://agiletoolkit.org/
Have you tried Axure? It's a tool for rapidly creating wireframes, prototypes and specifications for applications and web sites.
It works in a similar way to Balsamiq, but it allows you to export your wireframes/prototype as HTML, CSS and Javascript.
You can then upload this to a server or run it on your computer as a working example.
You can create forms, links, tabs, rollovers, Javascript effects.
If you are already using Balsamic Mockups for your prototypes then you should consider Napkee. To quote the website "Napkee lets you to export Balsamiq Mockups to HTML/CSS/JS and Adobe Flex 3 at a click of a button."
I ran into this awhile ago, and couldn't find anything, so I took it as an opportunity to learn css. But since then it seems great strides have been made towards this subject.
Summarizing your problem, there is a wikipedia page.
There is yaml-css, which takes yaml and turns it into css
There is baseline, but it assumes some css knowledge.
I'd also suggest looking at Adobe's Dreamweaver. They have a lot of css and style generation tools which produce very readable and w3c compatible code.
I hope that helps.
A combination of 960gs for layout and jQuery-UI or Jquery tools is great
i use them almost in every project but i'd like to add to http://easyframework.com/
although its not a business friendly so
make sure to check out its license
but i like it
I recently discovered a nice website called iplotz.com where you can create a mockup of your application/website/project online without installing anything.
It also has most of the common controls, along with much more features for managing thw whole project and sharing it with others online.
I must admit, i didn't try it yet myself, but i looked at it a bit and it seems pretty cool. I'll probably be using it soon enough.
Sass looks like it has potential as a way to mitigate some css headaches.
I like to add Bootstrap it's intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development.
I like RocketCSS. Nice clean design, give it a go.
I am a c# developer.
Recently I had to design a web UI in asp .net 2.0 .I had strange problems with aligning controls in Visual studio UI.
I have used Div, table tags to align asp .net controls(labels, textbox, grid etc).
But the problem was what I saw in design surface of visual studio was entirely different (most of the time) when I view the page in browser.
The gap between controls and alignments was never perfect .I have seen other developers also doing trial and error methods without a proper guidelines.
C# coding I am pretty good and I have lots of Microsoft articles and help materials to guide me.
But I haven’t found proper articles and guidelines for UI design of asp .net pages.(may be its out there and i havent found yet?)
Can anyone through more light on this subject. Any good books ,suggestions etc?
Thanks in advance
SNC
If you want granular control over your HTML/XHTML output then I would recommend switching to ASP.NET MVC. The problems you've described are those typically encountered when using ASP.NET WebForms. As Anton mentions, you do need to gain a good understanding of XHTML and CSS as well.
While I definitly +1 everyone suggesting that you get a better grasp of CSS and positioning in general and ditch the drag and drop method of building your controls, I figure you need something sooner rather than later.
For that, I give you Yahoo!'s CSS Grids (JQuery, MooTools and other libraries also have grid layout tools) which will help you to get your UI done quickly. In the mean time read up on CSS.
(X)HTML is compositional - not unlike XAML (which is actually modeled on HTML/CSS). When building WinForms you can drag and drop your controls onto the window willy-nilly, but not so with the web. One thing the drag and drop designer misses is that (X)HTML components have a hierarchy to them. The designer tries to overcome this by using position: absolute; which is a precarious crutch.
Your controls need to be composed with their positional relationships more or less intact already and that means you'll have to edit the code by hand to put things in the proper order.
It's not the UI design per se. What you need is solid understanding of how CSS and generally styles work on the web (in short: they do poorly). So what you need is a good CSS book. Plus, you'll have to dump WYSIWYG ASP.NET page editor.
I'm curious if you feel your HTML skills are on par. Could you create this same page in HTML without visual studio and get the results you expect (using notepad)?
Regardless, start spending more time in the HTML markup and less time using the designer surface in Visual Studio. The more you understand the output that ASP.NET creates the better a web developer you will become.
A trick I use quite often is knowing that you don't need to recompile to change aspx code. Make your changes to the aspx file, save, and then refresh your browser. Also, use firefox and get the webdeveloper plugin. I use the outline block level elements quite often to understand where some of my html flow problems are occurring.
Read up on Web Design. I'm a bit behind but I've always loved zengarden and zeldman.. I'm sure there's better out there now.