Web Design Tips: Making Site Comps and Prototypes

This story is taken from "Designing Web Graphics.4."

New Riders is offering this book to creativepro.com readers at a special discount. Click here to learn more.

Because our interaction with the Web is only through the computer screen, we may not think about translating our ideas about Web sites to paper. But making preliminary drawings, flow-charts, and concepts on paper is a critical first step in the Web-design process. After delineating your ideas on paper, you can make a dummy in Photoshop or Fireworks to see how all the graphics fit together. Next stop: HTML.

Lynda Weinman wrote the book (literally) that showed legions of designers how to create compelling Web sites and graphics. In this excerpt from the fourth edition of "Designing Web Graphics," you’ll learn how to sketch your ideas on paper and then transform them into a working prototype.

We’ve posted this story as a PDF file. All you do is click this link "Comping and Prototyping" to open the PDF file in your Web browser. You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.

To open the PDF, you’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader. Get it here: