User Interface Design Question

One thing I would like to improve on for many of my web applications, is the user interface design and the "look and feel" of the sites. To begin looking at how to do this, I thought I would start by asking the community what additional software they use or would recommend to combine with either VS2008 or VS2010. Thanks for your time.

I use dreamweaver to create the skeletons of my pages.
I'm also learning CSS and html, it's essential for designing a web site.
For the look and feel, if you want special animations and stuff use jquery and the ajax toolkit for ready to go controls.

First, let me say that I am not a Web Designer, I am a Web Developer. My idea of what looks nice, is something that is simple to create :)

In earlier versions of Visual Studio, the design experience was "pretty" bad. As a result, other tools, like DreamWeaver became popular for doing the "front" end. However, using ASP.Net this became tricky, as the ASPX markup of the page, wasn't actually what was rendered out to the client, so there was some element of back and forth.

With newer versions of Visual Studio, such as 2010, the design experience is becomes a lot better, and there is more built in support for developing and creating CSS within Visual Studio. It still isn't perfect, but it is getting there.

Now, depending on what exactly you are doing and where you want to head, (in addition to the above suggestion from sap) you might want to consider Silverlight. With the very useful Expression Blend (part of the Expression Studio suite) the design experience, and look and feel capabilities are VERY good:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/

For straight up design on HTML, you might also want to consider Expression Web.

Again, for straight up ASP.Net, in terms of ease of changing the look and feel, you might want to consider the use of Master Pages, as well as Themes. Bottom line, CSS will be your friend in this, so I would encourage you to look at this.

Gary