How to Create a Perfect Mockup for a Website?
When building a website, most business owners focus their attention on the functionality. While features matter a lot, there is one more thing that can make or break the success of a website. This refers to website design. Before users interact with your website in any way, they will see the page design and form a judgment about it. A user decides whether a page they have loaded is up-to-date, useful and secure based on what they see. For this reason, the design phase is one of the most crucial stages of website development. Do you wonder how to create a perfect mockup for a website? We’re about to tell you in this post.
What is a website mockup?
In a nutshell, a website mockup is a visual representation of a website’s functionality. Based on the level of detail, a mockup might have all of the properties of a final website or just some of the most important ones.
It is important to distinguish between a website mockup and a website prototype clearly. A website prototype is an interactive demo of a website. A mockup represents the design of a website while a prototype represents its functionality.
A website mockup is a complete website design. To ensure smooth project development, it’s better to hire one team to create a website mockup and work with it until the project release. Modern technology allows business owners to outsource web design to a professional team that can deliver the expected quality of work on a budget. Choosing this option, customers get the best global talents to work for them without needing to bear all the costs of maintaining an in-house team. Now let’s get into the details of what makes a website mockup stand out.
Why does your website need a mockup?
So, why do you need a mockup anyway? Why not simply start coding and designing the website you need simultaneously? Creating a mockup is a lot faster and easier than building a website. At the same time, a mockup represents a website design completely. This way, you will be able to review, amend and modify your design before you actually build a website and invest in its development. Therefore, every website needs a mockup. With a good mockup, you will save a lot of time, money and energy in the long run and you’ll be able to prevent many design issues before they pop up.
What makes a website mockup great?
Over the last decade, digital technology developed at a blistering pace. What looked like an ultramodern website or mobile app two years ago looks like a fossil no one needs nowadays. Wonder how to make a website mockup fit for 2019? Here are the highlight targets your website mockup should hit:
– Reveal issues at stage one. A perfect mockup shows the design of a future website with enough detail for the team to detect any issues in it. It is best to do any color, element or style changes at this point.
– Convey a vision. It’s hard to convey a vision with words, and it’s expensive and time-consuming to convey a vision with a complete website. That’s when a mockup is a great solution.
– Give your client a choice. It rarely happens that the client and designer finish each other’s sentences. A mockup can help them communicate over the aspects of future design effectively.
– Engage the investors. Preparing a full website prototype or a complete website to impress your prospect investors is costly, and you never have any guarantees. A great mockup can do the persuading job with so much less input.
– Facilitate. A great website mockup is meant to serve as a reference that makes everyone’s work on the website easier.
– Guide. A good mockup should be a website guide for the development team, the client, the prospect investors and any other party involved.
Tools that help you make a perfect mockup
You can make a great mockup in many ways. Here are several options that are mostly used for creating a top website mockup in 2019:
– Adobe Photoshop: It’s one of the best UI mockup tools you can find. Every designer has it in their toolset at some point. With Photoshop, you can create mockups of any complexity.
– Moqups: It is a web application that allows designers to make mockups, prototypes and wireframes. With the help of this tool, they can also collaborate in real time smoothly.
– Adobe Illustrator: It is one of the most useful tools when it comes to creating mockups. This vector-based application has a pen tool that allows the drawing of any sleek elements easily.
– InVision: With the help of this online app, designers can create great mockups and prototypes. InVision allows team members to collaborate on a design smoothly.
– Mockplus: This is an all-in-one UI mockup tool that allows designers to create mockups for mobile, web and desktop. With this tool, you can make a mockup that includes all the best design practices for a given platform.
Final thoughts
A website mockup is an important step in web design and development. Based on the facts and reasons provided above, we hope that you agree that every website needs a good mockup. In 2019, you can build a great mockup using a wide array of tools. Don’t hesitate to try different options to find what tool works best for you.
Author’s bio: Maria Redka is a Technology Writer at MLSDev, a web and mobile app development company. She has been writing content professionally for more than 3 years. Maria researches the IT industry and the app development market to create educative content for the company’s clients and build MLSDev as a brand. The opportunity to share her knowledge with people who desire to understand more about app development is something that motivates Maria and inspires her to create more quality content.
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