Question for Pro Developers

I have never worked like this as I develop and style my own web applications and sites, but I can give you some advice...

Let the dog see the rabbit. Definitely. Without a shadow of a doubt.

Oh, and you need a designer, not a developer. You are doing the development.

And don't be surprised if you run into problems as the position, nestling and flow of the raw code will greatly restrict the designers' ability to work freely and hack effectively.

Personally, I don't think you're going about this the right way. You need to find a designer you can work with and involve him or her from the very start. If the code is already set in stone then someone somewhere will be sure to be able to work around it, but if you want the designer to give his all to the project then you need to be able to adapt what you have to suit his or her suggestions. CSS is not yet a black-and-white art. There are too many greys to spoil your project.

I'll be interested to know how you get on though. It's going to depend totally upon your ability to get on with your chosen designer. Keep them happy!

We are still developing... iterating through the code and fixing bugs. We don't plan to have everything set in stone when the designer gets involved. So we will definatley include the designer with this process of implementing the HTML.

We are developing this is ASP.NET, so they probably won't need to see the code behind that because each ASP tag describes its own css class name when you use it in the HTML page.

Thanks for your help, and I will reply back with any updates later. If anyone else has any comments please let me know.

Thanks,
Ryan

Agree with all Roy has mentioned. Also, to throw my observation in the ring... I've developed the design for an educational ASP.NET site (the client developed the site in ASP.NET, and I worked around it with CSS (and amending the HTML where feasible)).

It was a difficult task, mainly because, the main aim of the project was standards compliance (accessibility and code validation). As you probably are aware, ASP.NET is a no-no where accessible HTML code compliancy is concerned.

So therefore, if this is requirement also, the design-developer may have there own ideas about working with such problems.

Absolutely... there's a plug-in for ASP.NET which will make it output only complaint XHTML, but it's about £800 (from memory). Otherwise, it's a long wait for ASP.NET 2 (and the arrival of the new version Visual Studio .NET) which is earmarked to have good XHTML compliancy.

yeah, we are now writing our own web controls to output valid html... thanks for your input.

Ryan

Think ahead - code the site in XHTML. The differences are very minor and easy to pick up provided you have always coded cleanly