My customer has his own graphics designer he wants to use to style his web application we’re building in ASP.NET MVC 4.
Our solution is in Bitbucket, but if he can’t run it what choices do we have? I doubt he uses Visual Studio 2012.
One idea is for us to publish to our solution to a file system, send it to him, have him create a local IIS website on his machine (assuming he isn’t using a Mac). Mocking data or pointing to a test SQL in Azure isn’t a problem. Then he can make changes to .css and .cshtml files. Will this even work?
The point is that he needs to be able to test his changes. I know he can modify the views and just check-in. But he needs to deliver a working design. So it seems inefficient.
The graphics designer will have access to our test site so he can see how it works, what data we have and fields. Another idea is for him to build a static mock site using just HTML/CSS. Later I’d integrate his styles into customer’s solution, split his html into partial views which we use and add Razor syntax. Again, we’d like to leverage graphics designer for all of this.
Is there a best practice documented around this subject? How do other teams deal with this situation?
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The way we have done it in the past is have the designer just create static HTML pages and separate CSS files with their own mocked data. We then took the HTML/CSS and added it to the real project our selves.
Once we added to the main project and tested the designs with the real data, we would then go back to the designer with any tweaks that needed doing. We would then work much more closely with them to implement the tweaks and add the finishing polish. Would would have the odd day here and there where a dev would just work with the designer to implement the final tweaks straight away to get instant feedback and a fast turn around.
We did this because the designer had no experience with visual studio or razor, we were also using javascript templating in some areas too.
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