This book is for anyone who wants to learn about using .NET for web interface design. Beginner or hobbyist .NET developers can certainly get a good foundation of .NET web interface design by going through this book from cover to cover. However, more seasoned .NET professionals, especially if they tend to steer away from the GUI of their projects, can also pick up a thing or two by focusing on certain chapters that appeal to them. This book is meant to take a reader from the beginning of a project to the completion of the interface design.

Along the way, concepts are illustrated to show how the different pieces play together. So, anyone who really wants to understand the concepts presented in this book will be able to do so by reading the entire thing. However, this book should also serve as a good reference after you have read it or, in some cases, in place of reading it.

This book covers the concepts serious developers need to begin designing cool and consistent web layouts. The early chapters focus on general web design standards that you need to grasp in order to move into the later chapters. Specifically, these concepts are:

* Basic web design considerations (colors, fonts, images, accessibility, and so on) (Chapter 2)
* Photoshop basics to get you started making your own graphics and color schemes (Chapter 3)
* Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and their use in web design layout (Chapter 4)

When you finish these chapters, you will have the basic shell for the project that you will continue to develop throughout the book. You will have the header graphic, color scheme, and CSS layout that you will begin to incorporate .NET-specific concepts to in the later chapters. This includes:

* How to make .NET controls render accessible CSS code rather than their default: tables (Chapter 5)
* Using the built-in controls of .NET to create easily maintainable and consistent site navigation (and how to make them render CSS divs instead of tables) (Chapter 6)
* Creating your web site template with Master Pages (Chapter 7)
* Creating themes and skins to style your .NET controls (Chapter 8)
* Applying themes to your projects through various approaches, including base classing (Chapter 9)