Approach to get a common layouts

[Craig Kenisston]

Hi,

I'm developing my first asp.net application. It will be a small e-commerce
site, with product catalogos, shoping cart, etc.

I started to develop using a single page, the default.aspx, and having all
the content in User Controls.
The header, footer and menu are user controls, as well as the main content
page, it is a user control, too.

However, lately I've read about another approach, of creating individual
pages, and drop your header/footer/menus on each of this page ... however,
this would requiere to have the exact same table, for spacing purposes, on
each form, with the risk of non being 100% identical.

Which of these approachs would be considered the most commonly (and secure)
used ? Is there any other better ?
If you use the individual pages approach, how you do to get the same
identical spacing in each page ?

I've been reading all day about this in forums, but seems I have no
definitive word on the subject, so, what I most like to know, is which are
the possible problems I could have by following the "one-page, all
user-controls" approach ... (I'm just like at 20% of the project at this
moment).

Thanks in advance,

 

[Karl Seguin]

In my opinion the best approach is to use MasterPages
(http://www.metabuilders.com/Tools/MasterPages.aspx free). They'll give
you high reuse and high flexibility and are very simple to use. ASP.Net 2.0
will have built-in support for them, so it tells you something about how
popular they are (not that every built-in feature is popular ).

karl