My first free ASP.Net CSS web template

Note: I've added a label: "Free Template" for all my posts relating to converting free CSS XHML web templates to Asp.Net web projects.

While watching TV for a couple evenings, I converted a simple CSS XHTML web template into a Asp.Net 2.0 project.

The template I converted I found on ThemeBot.com. I like ThemeBot.com because most of the web templates are covered by the Creative Commons license. The license gives you two explicit rights: you are free to share the template and you are free to adapt the template. The license(s) have either one condition: you must attribute the template, in the manner as specified by the author or two: attibute and Share Alike, where if you share your creation, you must also use this license (Or a similar one).

The template I altered was this one: sparkBB014. It is a simple template for a blog. Here is the link to the sparkBB014 Demo.

Now with all the prelimaries out of the way, here is what I did:

I wanted to achive a couple of things:

1 - Use a MasterPage
2 - Wrap the reusable/optional elements in UserControls
3 - Move all the data to the code behind so that users can easily be made dynamic.

So, I created a web project and added a master page to the project. Next I copied all the markup from between the body tags and copied it into the master page.

Then I pulled out each block of data and the surrounding markup out and replaced it with a ContentPlaceHolder. Then inside the Default.aspx for each ContentPlaceHolder I placed a corresponding Content tag and filled it with the data/markup I had just removed from the Master Page.

Once that was done, I started IDing and runat=servering html elements so that I could touch them programatically.

Seeing that the entire blog design scheme was repeated for each entry, I pulled the entire structure out into into own ascx UserControl.

And since I would not want the search area on every page I moved it as well to its own ascx UserControl.

Last but not least, I removed the actual data from the markup and coded the codebehind c# to dynamically load the data into the markup. So, here is the zip file containing the project and here is a link to the asp.net site hosted at 1&1. Please, tell me what you think!