I have done standards-based sites with ASP.NET 1.1 a couple of years. It is basically pretty straightforward: just ditch all the buildt-in controls and such, Repeater is really the only control that can be used when you want ultimate control over the HTML. You just have to know your standards (and semantics, findability, usability, accessibility, …) and the rest will come by itself. It is not an easy task – I’ve spent years studying those and now finally begin to feel confident.
This approach is much more flexible: the behavior and the structure can be done, tried and tested first, the design can wait until there is real data with an usable site to work with. This evidently leads to better sites, at least at my company. Of course there are lots of other benefits than just more flexible workflow.
Nice to see you guys are getting into this. I have seen lots of great site shells done by web designers, that have been destroyed afterwards by coders that don’t yet get it. Really exciting stuff.