Chapter 3
Designing Websites
What you will learn in this chapter:
- How Razor layout pages work
- How to create small blocks of reusable content
- How to pass data between content and layout pages
In the previous chapter, you learned that HTML and CSS are the basic building blocks in website development. Their purpose is to provide structure and style to your web pages. You were advised to use external style sheets to assist with the maintainability of your site’s design. The skills you have learned so far are applicable to all kinds of websites, not just those built on the ASP.NET Web Pages framework.
Maintainability is an important concept within web design. One of the core principles behind maintainability is the DRY principle, which stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself. In essence, the idea behind this philosophy is that you should minimize the number of places in which you need to make changes should alterations be required. The advice in the previous chapter to use external style sheets as opposed to page level style sheets follows this principle.
Most sites feature the same content on every page, or within a large number of pages. Headers, footers, and navigation systems are just some examples. Adding the same header to every page in your site breaks the DRY principle. If you need to change the appearance of the header, you need to edit every page. The sample site you will begin building in this book has a header, footer, login panel, search bar, and other areas that will feature ...
