[thelist] Making Mock Ups

[Christopher Orth - HQ]

>When you're doing this for your own stuff, it's no problem, but as you
start designing sites for
>various clients who all have their own agendas, it's frustrating (at times)
to spend a lot of time
>on throwaway work and time is money.  Hence, it's nice to be able to slap
together a rough look


You know.... if you use Dreamweaver Templates and Library Items, you can
build "wire frame" mock ups in HTML that you never need to throw away!.  My
team does this all the time.  Create a new template, then start dropping in
place holders for elements you know will be on the page.... just text is
fine, such as "Corporate Logo Here" and such.  Then you can work out basic
layout and make sure you have everything you need on the page.  Content
developers can immediately start putting content into the templates and
creating new pages, and developers can immediately begin wiring in back end
code.

You then take this to your visual designer and say "put pretty pictures
here".  The visual design is then driven by the information architecture and
content rather than the other way around (which is how it should be, IMO).
Just update the library items with the visual elements you create as you get
them, and update the template to reflect larger scale layout changes.
Dreamweaver updates all pages that use those Library Items and Templates as
you make changes, so the site grows holistically as you update it.  When you
get everything in place, update the primary template in BBEdit or Homesite
to get the really clean code you want, then let Dreamweaver update again.

This is a very cool way to work, and the development cycle is greatly
decreased since no work is ever "thrown away", and most members of the web
team can work on the site at the same time without waiting.  You will want
to do some forward thinking around content presentation standards such as
common header styles, but otherwise things are really flexible.



> --
> 
> Christopher Orth - Webmaster
> The Casey Family Program
> -
> corth at casey.org
> Desk: 206-282-7300 X 8556
> Mobile: 206-510-4465
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