Better approach for my first asp.net project?

Background info: 2 semesters of C#(WinForms), plenty of HTML/CSS skill, brand new to asp.net.

I'm building a site for a friend who's a photographe开发者_如何学Gor. It's just a gallery site, but he'd like to be able to update the galleries himself and he's not tech savvy in the least. So I'm using the following approach to the problem:

Using ASP.NET 4 WebForms:

I'm using System.IO to get the names of the folders which represent the "Galleries" and populating a TreeView control for navigation.

When a "Gallery" is selected, I have code that builds a (HTML)list of the image files and populates an UpdatePanel with this list.

As this is all based on the folders/files, I'm building him an secure admin page to upload files to new or existing galleries(folders). He'll also be able to edit(move/delete) the existing files from there.

I got it all to work, which was a nice little victory, but I'm realizing this approach is not optimal, as none of the unique galleries are findable via search engine or even URL; the SEO value is nill; the browser back/forward buttons are useless...

Can you guys/gals recommend a better way to go about this? Is there a way to modify what I've already done to optimize the project?

I'll gladly start over to do this right.

Thanks

Couple of suggestions, if you are doing this for fun - and want to learn something, consider using ASP.Net MVC instead. Both will work, but doing it with MVC will give you more up-to-date and marketable skills.

Second, unless you really want to write the whole thing from scratch, consider using a package to do most of what you want and then customize it.

Something like this would work quite well: http://www.galleryserverpro.com/ and is open source, free/cheap and well supported.

SInce you are new to asp.net, you can learn a lot by picking thru the open source code and seeing how other people with more experience have already solved the very same issues.

When a "Gallery" is selected, I have code that builds a (HTML)list of the image files and populates an UpdatePanel with this list.

Well, most of your problem is sitting inside this sentence. get rid of the UpdatePanel. When you are making ajax request, you are not able to allow browser history. so SEO, back/forward nav. buttons are always issue with updatepanel.

http://ajaxhistory.com/