Hello, and thanks for taking at look at my question.

I am preparing to create an ASP site which provides training. Being completely new to ASP.net, though I have some VB, SQL, WPF experience, I am unsure of a suitable approach for a particular aspect of my project.

The training content comprises many small Lessons which can be thought of like chapters in a book. In fact the content will be laid out like pages in a book with no scroll bars anywhere, just carefully positioned text, images and Flash movies. Each Lesson may be, say, 18 Pages (screens) of content which I want the user to simply click through. So my first question is:

What is a sensible method for creating a series of 'pages' where each page has its own unique layout based upon a Master Page?

The text and media references (paths to the artwork/movies) will be stored in a series of related SQL tables along with the inherent structure. For example a Lesson table would store data for each Lesson and each individual Lesson will have related Page rows. Each Page row, in the Page Table, will have related Text items and Media items etc.

Having entered the structure and text content up front I wish to create a very simple and friendly website which will allow non-technical designers to position the text and artwork on each Page. I have a conceptual idea of how it may work from a user point of view, but no idea if it would be possible to implement. This would be a design only facility. Normal users would only see the completed Lesson once hosted.

I imagined a designer may open a Lesson and initially the text would be positioned in a default location, say top left with a textbox width of say 320 pixels. To the right of the page would be a Media Library window providing Tabs for different media types and lists (with thumbnails) of available artwork.

I would like the user to select a Text element, which has been assigned to the Page, and then select a position for the text. Perhaps they have a choice of each of the four corners, and then they can type in a width value. Having positioned the text they can then select a location for a media element, including background, select the media they wish to place on the page and again specify either a height or width for the media. A refresh button would allow them to see the web page update to reflect their changes.

I have no idea how this may work, but I can imagine that the MediaId, location and size parameters could be written to the Page SQL Table to store the layout information.

If you have any ideas or have seen something similar I would be very grateful for your thoughts.

Thank you.

Chris