Summary

This has been a pretty involved chapter, but you've learned a huge amount. We've looked at lots of topics that not only make your web pages look great, but also make them work really well. We could quite easily have written an entire book on web page design (and many other people have), but that's not the real focus of this book. What we've concentrated on is getting your pages looking great, as quickly as possible.

We started with a discussion of HTML and web controls, how the two are related, and when and why you should use each. We then covered how to use HTML elements to lay out your pages so they look good, and how to improve that look by setting properties and using images as controls themselves. We followed that with a section on getting user input by using web controls. Once the user has entered the data, they need a way to send that back to the server, so we looked at how to use buttons to get that data back from the user.

Finally, we looked at some of the architecture involved in how pages work. It may seem rather complicated, but it's vital to understanding how web pages are processed, and the sort of things you need to do in ASP.NET code.

All in all, this is a large amount of what you need to know when creating functional and pretty websites. Now it's time to leave the design alone for a while, and delve into the world of code.