Best Practices - Is there any downside to having an .aspx as the default (index) page for a website?

Is an .aspx page the best choice for the default, or index page for a website? The site I am designing can have all the server side controls on other pages, so the index page can be plain html. Are there any disadvantages to having an .aspx page load as the index, default page? Will a plain html page load faster, or have a higher availablity rate? Is there a cost/benefit to having an .aspx page, as the default page, if it doesn't include any server side interaction? Thanks for the benefit of your knowledge an experience.

 

Yes, there are disadvantages to the start page being an aspx file. There are a slew of server events that are triggered when an aspx page is requested by a client. If there will not be any server side controls on the home page - which I'm assuming will also be the most frequently hit page - it is much better to make it an html file.


Keith Payne
Technical Marketing Solutions
http://www.tms-us.com

 

Thank you,


I guessed it was the case that there was overhead involved. From what you said, I take it that the difference is not trivial. I haven't seen any "Best Practices" for designing a website using ASP.NET. Most of the information I've seen has focused on how to use the various controls and IDE toolsthat are available, not much on when it is appropriate to use them. I'm sure that it depends a lot onthe nature of the website; its purpose,the number of concurrent users that are expected, and whether mostvisiters will be addressing the site, or arrive therethru a chain of links.


Thanks again for the insight.

 

It shouldn't really be an issue if you implement caching. That way, the HTML output of the ASPX page would get served from an in-memory cache of the page, instead of being read from disk and executed.

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Page level, or output caching, caches the HTML output of dynamic requests to ASP.NET Web pages. The way ASP.NET implements this (roughly) is through an Output Cache engine. Each time an incoming ASP.NET page request comes in, this engine checks to see if the page being requested has a cached output entry. If it does, this cached HTML is sent as a response; otherwise, the page is dynamically rendered, it's output is stored in the Output Cache engine.


Kai, MCP

 

Hi,


Thanks for the information. As I haven't been able to devote the time needed, I haven't yet finished preparing the web application for deployment. I'm still in the process of putting the pieces together. At least I have the look and feel established. Along the way I discovered the usefulness liquid design, external CSS and standards compliance. While the creation process is taking longer, in part, because of this, it should be easier to maintain, adapt and provide a better user experience. For now, I'm going with using all aspx pages, largely for the sake of uniformity. I hope that auto hitting the site, and the use of the caching scheme you mentioned will provide an acceptable result. Thanks again. BRN..

 

It's all built in for ya. Check out this site for details on how it's done (basically it just amounts to sticking some extra text in the header of the pages you want to cache).


http://authors.aspalliance.com/aspxtreme/aspnet/syntax/outputcache.aspx


Kai, MCP