Working with Master Pages - Introduction

Now that we are familiar with ASP.NET and Visual Web Developer Express 2005, we can start working on our project.

As we have seen earlier, our website is made up of several pages - a homepage, login page, user registration page, products page and so on. In order to provide a consistent look to our web site, we will use a new feature of ASP.NET 2.0 called `Master Page'.

A master page is a template for the entire web site. It contains the features that we want on each page of our web site. For example, we can create a master page with a company logo, banner, site menu and copyright notice. Now, all other pages that use this master page will have these features available in them plus their own contents. These pages are called `content pages'.

Creating a master page saves a lot of time because we need to design the common features only on the master page once and all the content pages will implement them automatically.

Note: It is best to create the master page before we create any content pages. However, it is possible to add a master page later and link it with previously created pages.