We are creating a shopping site.  We are then going to have other sites act as affiliates and send traffic to our site for a profit sharing model.  When the user gets to our site we want to be able to customize the homepage to make it fit in with the affiliate's site as much as possible.  This means that the affiliate must have the ability to move sections of the page to certain areas.  We're trying to figure out the best way to do this without creating numerous templates that the main page pulls from based on the affiliate id.  So far I've done a bit of reading about web parts but from my understanding they're geared more toward the end user to allow them to rework the page entity locations and they're not really designed to do what we're trying to do.  The other option is css but I'm afraid that would still be a nightmare to code to get it to be as flexible as they want it.  Are there any other options we can look at that would allow us the flexibility to move most any part of the page anywhere we want without having a ton of excess css or additional template pages?  Thanks.

 It's a bit hard to say without knowing the complexity of the page or the amount of customization needed. One option could be to let the affiliates create their own templates and stylesheets, which you combine with your own output using one of two methods:

1. The affiliates are allowed to edit a prepending HTML part and an appending part.
2. The affiliates insert your content using placeholders (not ASP.NET placeholder, but rather some kind of placeholder comment) in an HTML file.

Have a look at how www.spreadshirt.net and www.cafepress.com allows affiliate pages with customized look and feel.

You have to make sure that the affiliates' code doesn't introduce security problems, such as XSS (Cross Site Scripting)

I think we've come up with a solution that basically uses css but also asp.net to dynamically add the sections to the page in the right order.  We're finding that we've got a number of affiliate specific site settings which load every time a new user session starts.  I'm wondering if there's a way to cache those settings so that the session start doesn't have to hit the database to look up those settings.  I haven't used caching in asp.net so I don't know what options are available there.  I'll do some reading but any ideas?  Thanks.