What is a Mockup in Web Design?

A web design mockup is basically a digital montage which has been put together by a graphic designer long before work on the actual website has begun. The idea is to give clients and members of the web development team a clear idea of what a completed web page will look like to make sure everyone is happy with it before the real thing has been built.  This allows decision makers to double check that the design of the page meets with their approval and to make any changes before they commit to the expense and effort of having the actual coding done.

The mock up process is fundamental to the work we do in web design. UK clients have rightly come to expect that they will be involved in the creation of their online presence and making sure they can see what we, as designers are creating for them is a vital part of that. There is, after all, very little point in presenting a client with a fully finished working site if they take one look at it and decide they need to change the colour scheme and move the logo to the other side of the screen.

We make sure that never happens by systematically working through a process. A company approaches us to build their website, which starts the ball rolling. The first thing we do is listen carefully to their requirements and look very closely at any design elements they already have such as logos and colour scheme ideas. Obviously our designers bring in their own considerable experience to throw some of their own ideas into the discussion.

Once a general consensus has been reached our team then takes those ideas and generates a range of mockup designs options based on the company’s existing branding and the ideas generated in these discussions. This range of designs is then presented to the client who can evaluate each one and either make their selection or ask for some changes.

We do this because it would be extremely wasteful to build a fully functional website based on each design for the client to then choose just one and abandon all of the rest of the work. The range of mockups allows the client to make all of their design decisions – including any desired changes - before the site is built. Far from being an extra step the mockup stage streamlines the whole process making it faster, more efficient and less expensive while at the same time ensuring client satisfaction and enabling them to use the same design and branding in other areas of their business.

This is why the mockup phase matters. When people think about building websites they think about people hunched over keyboards writing lines after line of code – and we can confirm that is a very big part of it. But everything starts with the work if the graphic design team and their skill with colour and composition. There really is an art to this, a real, practical art. Which is why when you want the best, you need to look to the North West.

When you think of things like graphic design and web design Blackburn is not always the first place that springs to mind. But we think that the pragmatically efficient nature of the web design process is entirely within the creative industrial heritage of the North West. Blackburn has always been an industrial heartland, it is a place that has always made things to a high standard. Finding ways to make them better, more efficiently and at lower cost has been part of the culture here for generations.