just wondering is there any free tool which can aid in making the GUI/interface layout of asp.net/html forms ? My forms mostly end up in being less user friendly and not good looking at all.
I have been using Bootstrap framework to get my design up to speed in no time. You can use this tool to get forms created in minutes. http://bootsnipp.com/forms?version=3
Why don't you try downloading the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar and use it to reverse-engineer some simple, good looking sites that you come across?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/61772/
You can use it to grab the entire CSS of any site, or hover over areas of a page and see the various divs and their associated CSS rules highlighted.
Related
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.
Hi I am developing a website with multiple pages. I am a beginner, coding is still a challenge for me, but my main hardship is designing my website. Visual studio is very not intuitive when it comes to designing websites, and sometimes you feel (when you try to design) like you work while tied in a straightjacket. I am used to dragging stuff around when designing, but this doesn't work with websites. There are a lot of website templates, but is there any which work with asp.net? And how do you integrate them while working in visual studio? Any help?
You don't need any special templates to work with ASP.Net. Integrating a template works the exact same way as it would if you are designing a site from scratch.
Find out your major pieces that are in every page (or groups of pages) and create your master pages that will provide consistent layout for those pages.
Forget about dragging and dropping and pixel design locations of a regular desktop app, it's not going to work that way.
Start with a framework such as Bootstrap, or a template based on Bootstrap. It's extremely well documented, works cross-platform, and there are plenty of tutorials out there on using it.
Visual Studio works pretty much like any other web design tool does. You're just running into exactly how things have been done for well over a decade now. Tools get better, but the web is an entirely different experience that requires entirely different ways of doing things.
You can easily templates or frameworks into your site. You can add styling to form fields, buttons, etc. easily through the CSS of the template.
Take a look at Bootstrap to get an idea of how you can style elements and understand the layout tricks that can be accomplished with responsive design.
I am working on a Facebook iFrame application, and have a question about styling.
I want the application content to look like the rest of facebook. So the most obvious approach I could think of was to use a stylesheet provided by Facebook for application development that includes such styles. However I cannot seem to find anything about this on developers.facebook.com or any other site for that matter.
I have created some FBML application earlier, and these was able to use Facebook styles directly since the application content was rendrered within the facebook pages. But iframes does not inherit the stylesheet from the parent content (nor should they), so I was wondering how (or possibly if) this can be done.
I have found some posts/blogs that simply tells you to create an application stylesheet that mimics the Facebook look. But I don't think this is a very good idea, as this CSS must be updated every time anything changes on Facebook. It also seems that all facebook wiki pages regarding CSS (which I have used before) has been removed.
The reason I do not want to use FBML Canvas is that Facebook is in the process of deprecating this approach. They recommend new applications to be created using iframes.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fbml/
I really hope anyone has any good ideas on this.
There is no official way. For some reason, FB shards their styles to a ridiculous degree. They also change the filename rather than appending a version parameter every time they make a change to prevent downstream caching. Here's an example of todays stylesheets:
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/y-/r/40PDtAkbl8D.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yE/r/u7RMVVYiOcY.css
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yT/r/P-HsvhlyVjJ.css
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yT/r/CFyyRO05F0N.css
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/y0/r/k00rCIzSCMA.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yv/r/BJI6bizfXHL.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yD/r/rmbhh_xQwEk.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yn/r/xlsrXFt9-vD.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yN/r/Uuokrl6Xv3c.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/y0/r/klTGALEjWM8.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yN/r/mlYhlJwnCdr.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yT/r/uFI2FW2LitH.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yh/r/5Bzj1255G1S.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yp/r/5UteuBI1b8_.css
You can automate this process fairly easily using either PHP or .NET using existing solutions Minify and Combiner respectively.
A simpler method would be to use the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox, go to Facebook and choose the Web Developer toolbar option to "view CSS" which will bunch all the CSS up for you. Copy and paste it into your own local stylesheet and you only have to update when Facebook makes a major change.
So while there is no simple way (that I am aware of), there are methods for you take care of it in a fairly speedy manner.
Past, now irrelevant back story: I was trying to make some changes to BlueBand and get 'up and running pretty quickly' but after looking at it further this is no longer an option due to tables that a previous developer introduced into the layout. I'll have to live with this and make what tweaks I can.
So, looking towards future greenfields projects...
Are there any recommendations for CSS frameworks that work nicely with SharePoint publishing sites? (Examples are BluePrint, YUI.) They should not interfere with standard out-of-the-box controls such as the Site Actions menu, rich text editor, and publishing toolbar.
Real world experiences welcomed, please!
What would you like to use a CSS framework for? As far as I can tell you could use one for making a cross-browser reset but everything else just depends on your layout. If you're planning to throw out the standard SharePoint layout it means that you need to start from scratch. The good news is that it's not much different than creating a layout for any other website. There are some things you need (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa660698.aspx) while working with SharePoint but as for CSS it's all up to you.
Heather Solomon has a great blog/guide on wiring up SharePoint CSS classes - take a look:
http://www.heathersolomon.com/content/sp07cssreference.htm
Cheers,
Adam
You will run into a lot of trouble trying to hack the blue band theme into a table less layout.
You may get some mileage from the free Accesibility Kit for Sharepoint.
It comes with layout pages, CSS and even control adapters for those who care about the HTML of thier site.
Still, getting rid of the tables produced by SharePoint is not really compatible with "up and running pretty quickly"
You should start with the minimal masterpage. That will be the masterpage that's connected to the publishing layouts. You can then add in all the html/css you desire to your masterpage and layouts to make them look like anything you want.
If the users who are browsing those same publishing pages also need access to your list forms (new,edit,display) you will have to edit those files and attach them to your masterpage (either through SP Designer or a Feature to do it automatically). Or, customize the application masterpage to be nearly the same as your publishing masterpage and deploy them both as a feature with an HTTP Handler that changes the masterpage for the application.master at runtime.
Also an FYI, there are many issues once you start customizing list form pages for a site accessible to anon users, so do your research first on that one if needed.
We have used 960.gs with some success. Just include it in your master page, and wrap the main content area with a - or use container_12/container_24. Then in your individual page layouts, you can leverage all the columns/push/pull/alpha/omega goodies that make 960 so great. This works in 2007 and 2010, just takes a bit more work in 2007.
You can use any framework you desire when working with Sharepoint, however, the primary concern is how much control you have over web parts. OOB web parts use table based layout. If you have full control over how the web parts use the markup they product then you are one step closer to using a framework with little headache.
To alleviate some of the table based layout used in web parts you can look at accessibility toolkits to convert the web parts appropriately.
There are plenty of ways to provide a dynamic style/theme for a web site, but I am looking for some help on some best practices or techniques that have worked well for others.
I am creating a web site that needs to provide the ability for customers to create or specify their own colors, style, theme, or layout. I'm not convinced how much flexibility I need yet, but basically I need to provide Branding capabilities.
I will be using ASP.NET, and am open to any ideas that will fit within the ASP.NET framework.
Using Themes for ASP.NET 2 and greater will provide you everything you need for this.
Best way to handle it would be to make a nice CSS document that will specify all the areas that you would like to offer customization, such as header background image, background and text colors, etc. Then build application code to allow specification of which theme to load, and bring up that CSS file.
I'd personally go for a CSS-based solution.
You could define the elements' IDs and CSS classes for each page in the web application, so that customers can provide their own set of CSS files.
This approach is platform-agnostic, so that the developer who creates the custom themes is not forced to fit into the ASP.NET themes model - she might as well be a web designer with no programming knowledge.
Themes might be a good solution but having re-read your question I think you might be asking for a method for allowing customers to submit their own branding dynamically, i.e. without you having to modify any files, a hands-off approach? How about having an admin interface consisting of web forms where the customer can upload images and CSS themselves? You could then retrieve that content using a HttpHandler or similar.