This is the first part in a three part series on building a professional website from scratch. This part will go over the design process, so we will be making a PhotoShop mock-up of our website. In the next step I will go over marking-up a template with HTML and CSS, and then we’ll complete the series with converting the template into an ASP.NET Master Page. To complete this Tutorial in its entirety, you’ll need:

• PhotoShop (the version doesn’t matter much, as we’re not doing anything overly complicated or tool-specific)
• Visual Studio (I’m using 2008, but you should be able to use 2005 as you just need support for Master Pages)

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about MVC frameworks. To be honest, I come from a design background. I tend to look at programming from a view that benefits designers. I know that a lot of programmers are not 100% concerned with how clean their generated code is, as long as the back-end code is clean and the program produces predictable results. With that said, I’ll try to be fair about this. More...

After reading Smashing Magazine's article on "Lessons From Swiss Style Graphic Design" I started thinking about the principles they presented and how I incorporate them in my own work. I have always been a subscriber to the “less-is-more” state of mind when it comes to my work; however it is really easy to get bogged-down when trying to design user friendly interfaces for data-intensive applications. Here is what I took away from this article, and my ideas for incorporating their bullet-points into data driven applications. More...