For the examples in this article, I am going to use Telerik's RadControls to build a site layout.  When developing a template, some of the controls that Telerik provides that make the template better are:

·         Rotator - Like the ASP.NET AdRotator control, this control can rotate advertisements, but in a much better way. The typical ASP.NET AdRotator control displays one image on every page load. Telerik's control rotates many images at the same time. This means multiple ads can be displayed at one time in a rotating fashion, rather than a single advertisement.

·         PanelBar - This control creates an outlook-like navigation bar, which expands or collapses the panels open so that only one panel is visible at a time. If you are familiar with the AJAX control toolkit, this is similar to the Accordion, except much better.

·         Dock - The docking controls provide web part functionality to a page, while giving you control over how the content is loaded or saved to the database. This is nicer because the .NET framework does not make it easy to load/save content to a custom database (you have to create a custom personalization provider to store to your own custom data store).

·         Toolbar - The toolbar control renders a bar at the top of the page, containing a combination of buttons, drop down, and split buttons to represent the page.  The toolbar is reminiscent of a windows application, a feature that is great for rich applications.

·         Menu - This is another control that functions like most windows-based applications, giving the user the ability to select a specific menu item in a complex menu navigation structure. This menu is similar to the ASP.NET menu control, but is better in many respects.

·         TreeView - The tree control from Telerik is a great control to have, if that is the type of navigation system desired. While tree controls are nice to have, some UI layouts need the panel bar or a menu.

Only the first three controls will be evaluated in this article.

When designing a template, it is not just as simple as picking the layout controls. You are still in control of the layout design choices (is the panel bar on the left or the right side of the app?).  This often requires some playing around and repositioning accordingly. However, this article is going to focus in the components themselves. Let us begin to examine them.

Note: This article assumes that you have downloaded and installed Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX.