4 ways to create website mockups (even if you have no design experience)
If you’ve ever worked on a website design or redesign project, you know how difficult it is to please everyone involved. Sales wants every page to generate leads. Customer support wants to make sure the design doesn’t lead to an increase in support volume. People Ops wants to highlight how great it is to work at your company.
Essentially, creating website UI mockups can be hard, especially if you are a complete novice when it comes to all things web and app UX design. Regardless of experience however, there are a range of ways to work on website design varying from the technically easy to more advanced methods.
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How to create a website mockup
Create website mockups with Uizard
What is a website mockup?
Before committing resources to coding your new website, it’s valuable to make sure that your key decision-makers and stakeholders are happy with the design you’ve arrived at. That’s why it’s so valuable to create a website mockup. A mockup is a static representation of your website that helps you visualize and evaluate the site’s design before you move on to coding it. To find out more about what mockups are, you can read more in our dedicated guide to design mockups.
How to create a website mockup
There are a number of ways that you can create a website mockup ranging from design mockup tools to hand drawn mockups. The method you choose will depend on your design skills and what you want from your mockup. Here are four of the best ways to create a website design mockup:
- Draw your website design on paper
- Use design software for your mockup
- Hire a designer to create your mockup
- Use Uizard to build your design mockup
1. Create your website design mockup on paper
If you’re open to taking the low-tech approach when creating your website mockup or wireframe, then you could create your website mockup using pen and paper.
Pros
There’s no easier way of creating a mock website design. Just grab a pad and pen. Paper mockups keep things simple — no getting hung up on making the design look just so. It’s intentionally low-fidelity.
Cons
It’s not easy to collaborate or get feedback on a paper-based mock website — unless, of course, your collaborator happens to be in the same room with you.
You can only take a physical website mockup so far before you need to recreate it in a digital format. After all, the point of a mockup is to get a highly realistic representation of what the website will look like. Trying to achieve that in a non-digital format would be difficult, tedious, and time-consuming. (However, if you do start with a pen-and-paper sketch, you can easily digitize it with Uizard — just take a picture of it.)
Best for
Quick sketches or wireframes, rather than mock websites/mockups:
Paper-based mockups can be a useful first step for getting the basic ideas for your website out of your head, so you can begin to see what your website might look like. But to easily edit your mockup, add detail to it, and share it with collaborators, you’ll want to move your mockup into a digital format.
2. Create a website mockup with design software
Creating mockups in Sketch (Source: Sketch)
You can use mockup software like Sketch and Adobe XD to mock up a website in far more detail than you ever could with pen and paper. However, non-designers might find these tools overwhelming.
Pros
Design software is a powerful option that can help you create highly detailed and sophisticated designs. Adobe XD and Sketch have both been around for quite a few years, have robust feature sets, continue to evolve and improve over time, and offer a wide variety of plugins to extend their functionality. And new entrants like Figma have taken market share away from Adobe and Sketch by focusing on collaboration.
Cons
As with many software tools, there are trade-offs for all the power and extensibility that these tools offer. They’re complex and can be difficult to learn. The learning curve may cause your mockup project to take longer than you had planned.
These tools can also be resource-hungry and require a powerful workstation. Reviews of both Adobe XD and Sketch note that the desktop apps can slow down your computer.
Best for
Experienced UX designers who want to create their own detailed, customized website mockups
3. Hire a designer to create your mock website
There are plenty of professional designers who could create a website mockup for you. Whether or not you want to go this route will depend on your priorities and budget.
Pros
Outsourcing your website design mockup to a designer is a good option for people who loathe creative work or aren’t able to translate their design ideas to paper or screen. It also frees up your time.
Plus, you likely won’t need to learn any new software. The designer can create the mockup files and share those with you in the format you prefer. If the designer wants you to give feedback directly in whatever tool they use to create the mockup, you’d only need to learn how to leave feedback — which the designer can walk you through.
Cons
The first one is obvious: designers aren’t cheap, and the better they are, the more they cost.
Plus, while a designer saves you the burden of the creative work, it does not save you the burden of, well, hiring a designer. Hiring a designer entails signing up to find a designer, negotiating a price, and, above all, managing the project. You need to be actively involved in overseeing the designer’s work and giving prompt feedback on the mockup to keep the project moving forward.
Best for
People who want a highly detailed website mockup without having to create it themselves and who are willing to pay for a professional to create one
4. Use Uizard to create your website design mockup
Uizard occupies a unique space among website mockup tools and might be the best option for those among us who are not professional designers.
Pros
We built Uizard so that anyone could design websites, apps, and software. With our UI design templates (available for landing pages, e-commerce stores, and other types of websites), you won't find yourself stuck staring at a blank screen, wondering where to begin. Plus, themes make it easy to apply colors and styles to your website design mockup — you can even import styles from your existing website using Uizard's AI-powered Design Assistant.
Uizard also enables you to collaborate in real-time. This makes brainstorming and group editing easy and ensures that everyone on the team has a chance to share their feedback and be heard.
Cons
We built Uizard for rapid creation and prototyping, not for designing every minute detail. Experienced designers may find the lack of advanced editing capabilities frustrating. (However, it’s easy to export your design from Uizard so that you can share your mockup with a designer.)
Best for
Non-designers who want to easily create and collaborate on a mock website design.
Create website mockups with Uizard
Once you've determined which of these four methods is best for you, it's time to kick off your next mock website design project! If you are aiming to create website mockups with digital software, then Uizard is the perfect tool for you. Designed for ease-of-use, designing with Uizard is fast and collaborative. Most importantly, it's completely free!
That's right, you can sign up to Uizard for free now and start your web design mockups in just a few clicks.
Want to know more about the world of UX design tools? Maybe you've got more questions about the design basics or about web mockups? Head over to the Uizard blog now and continue your magical design journey.