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| This blog was created from scratch in ASP.NET few years ago. While you should rather consider today a free blogging/CMS solution using frameworks such as WordPress, Google's Blogger/Blogspot, Drupal, Joomla etc, if you still want to experiment or create an ASP.NET blog, website or CMS from scratch, here are the guidelines. | ||
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Pros and Cons
Rather then recreating from zero your own website infrastructure, using a free existing CMS (Content Management System) gives you multiple advantages: someone else took care of implementing and testing the required basic functionality, such as article editing and listing, comments entry, providing RSS feeds and sitemaps. Existing CMSs define a well-organized structure of your posts and files, saving content in a back-end database, such as MySQL or SQL-Server. Most CMSs are open to themes, widgets and plugins created by large communities of developers.
The only major problem I found so far in using an external CMS is sometimes this does not give you enough flexibility in combining different technologies. If you are the sole owner, administrator and publisher of your blog, you still have to deal with some restrictions imposed by the general-purpose framework. For instance, it's hard to plug-in an ASP.NET widget within a PHP blog such as WordPress. With your own blog you can experiment and set your own limits: some pages can be in ASP.NET, others in PHP or Ruby. Just be careful at your security aspect, because too much flexibility can open holes for hackers or spammers.
Choosing a Theme
The look and feel of your blog is largely determined by CSS, static images and possibly some JavaScript. Your stylesheet can be adapted from existing free themes available for external CMSs. For instance, this website uses a theme translated from an available free WordPress PHP Theme that you can find on the Internet. The theme may be free and open-source, but it is customary to give credit to its original creator as he requires, usually by providing a backlink to its website from the footer of your page.
There is a tendency today towards lighter themes and a clean and economic layout. The Web 2.0 era has a preference for rounded boxes and gradient colors, but do not abuse with too much blitz and gadgets. Keep it clean and well organized. If users are looking for content, you must provide a pleasant visual experience for them while they are visiting your blog. Advertising should not be abusive.
While you will still find many blogs with three-column themes, my advice is to chose just one sidebar and make your content column larger. Most people have larger screens today, but try not to enlarge your content to the full width. Keep it to a maximum width, in the middle of the screen.
Give your blog a visual identity, by providing a favicon. This is a small icon that you can interactively create online at favicon.cc and place at the root of your website as favicon.ico. In your master page head section, provide links to this icon.
Lists and Articles
Main purpose of any blog is to keep a list of posts, ordered by the published date, with most recent first. Topic lists should contain a header and a short excerpt or description for each post. Each list page must show up to 10 topics, and in ASP.NET you can create and use a custom ASCX Page Navigator user control, that could handle lists of articles, as well as multiple pages of the same post, or even pages of lists of comments.
With ASP.NET, you should always use at least one Master Page, to keep things well organized and provide a similar layout for each page. You may opt for one master page for your lists, and a different master page for the article details.
Advanced CMSs offer friendly text-based or HTML-based editors, to type your articles. Topic's content is usually saved in the database. My ASP.NET blog has static ASPX pages and the database saves only the index to these articles. In the HTML view of a Visual Studio or Web Developer IDE, text editing will be mixed-up with HTML tags, but in Design view you can focus on just text. The advantage is you can insert any kind of code and extensions, which is not always allowed in CMSs. Along with the posts, the section of Online Tools sends to several ASPX pages with web forms, postbacks and callbacks, which prove how useful a blog built from scratch can be.
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