Themes & Master Pages - Are they enough ?

I’m not a graphics designer, not even close.

In fact, I’m what you might refer to as esthetically challenged.

So lately I’ve been toying with the idea of building an ASP.NET based CMS, mostly due to my frustration about the lack of .NET based options when compared to PHP.

So I’ve been working on application architecture and ASP.NET offers lots of great synergies, but one place I’m stuck is in the area of UI abstraction for the purpose of themeing.

I understand how themes and Master Pages work technically, but my lack of design acumen leaves me struggling when evaluating them for complex UI design.

So, to get me started I picked up a copy of Jacob Sanford’s new book….

ASP.NET 2.0 Design – CSS, Themes and master Pages

I’ll blog a review and probably do some videos from what I learn, but in the mean time…..

What are YOUR thoughts about Themes and Master pages ?

What are the issues, tips, tricks, gotchas ?

Are Themes & master Pages flexible enough to serve as a templating engine for an application like Joomla or am I better off building an HTML/CSS skinning system from scratch ?

Thanks!