Web Design All-in-One for Dummies®

Chapter 6. Mocking Up the Design

In This Chapter

• Using the visual site map as a guide for the layout

• Selecting and setting up a graphics program

• Mocking up the site design

• Strategically placing page elements in the mock-up

• Designing additional graphics for the site

If you already read the previous chapters in the book, you've covered quite a bit of ground laying the foundations for your project. With the site's purpose, a grasp of the target audience, and the definition of the ideal site visitor, you should now have a firm identity for the site that includes ideas about colors, fonts, graphics, photographs, layout, navigation, and other design-related site components. You may now take all that information, combine it with the content on the home page and your visual site map, and jump feet first into your chosen graphics software program to create the actual mock-up for the design.

In this chapter, you mush all that information, your research, and your design decisions into a one-of-a-kind layout for your Web project. Hopefully what you'll quickly find is that by using the project's site map as your guide, you can easily generate a unique, creative, and compelling Web page mock-up that best represents the project goals and the client's vision for the site, all the while with an eye of what will best appeal to the target audience. Sounds like a tall order, but it's really not. All you must really do is put all the parts of the site together in a visually pleasing way — whatever that means ...