When we hear "ASP.NET Page Templates", we usually think of it as a way to maintain design consistency on the website. But, ideally your page template should do more for you. Why stop with just design consistency? You should even try to get functional consistency out of it.

What is a Page Template?

When you have a team of ASP.NET developers building pages, it would be ideal if design & functional consistency were maintained in all of their pages. But, more often than not, this is not the case. At the end, you would have a set of pages - all looking & behaving differently from each other. This is where page templates come in – a page template is nothing but a class that would be responsible for rendering the features common to all pages like – header, logo, left/right menus, footers, help links, etc.

The Page Template class would inherit from System.Web.UI.Page. The code behind class for each page would then inherit from the Page Template class & not System.Web.UI.Page.