Coming back to web designing...

[djkav]

Hi. Last time I dabbled with web design, it was 2004. I was a .Net c# developer. I've since been out of the loop due to redundancy and illness. I'm just getting back into things.

I'm ok with VS 2015, SQL Server and the c# side of things. The last time I touched the web front end was with dreamweaver.

Whats the default tool set for web design. I guess its a text editor, photoshop (I have creative cloud) then what?

I hear talk of SASS/LESS and CSS Preprocessors etc. I don't want to get my web sites bogged down with layers of frameworks. Just a nice designers pipeline.

Any advice is helpful.

 

[Scotty123]

Great time to come back, lots of exciting .Net features are on their way. Should check out ASP Core, the next (rebuilt) version of ASP.NET.

I'd say Visual Studio if you're working with server side code too for rendered html in asp. If just the front end, Visual Studio Code. Yes SASS is nice, makes handling CSS nicer with variables etc. Recommend learning that too.

 

[radderfire]

What are your particular goals? Do you want to get good at front end design, because you sound more like a developer??? If you do, then I would learn to hand code a simple responsive site design, mobile first then switch to 2 or 3 column for tablet then desktop. Understand what media queries are.

Once you've done that, look at the Bootstrap framework, and understand its grid system. It's very powerful and it takes care of all cross-browser issues for you, which is extremely handy!!

 

[Cern]

Responsive Design. Mobile first. Cross-platform. Cross-browser. Accessibility. These are the central tenets these days.

Whether you achieve these goals through a full blown framework, a stripped down skeleton framework or some home-baked code is up to you.

Personally I usually take the middle path, I use a framework as then I know a lot of responsive and cross-platform issues are taken care of) but I strip out all the bloat I don't need.

As for tools for front end design, if you have Creative Cloud give Dreamweaver and associated tools a try. Personally I've found I've drifted away from Dreamweaver because I ended up using it as a glorified text editor because I could never fully trust its WYSIWYG capabilities. For me things have almost come full circle and I get the best results from a good text editor combined with Chrome's Developer Tools (or the Firefox equivalent).