Mock Up

[shadowayex]

Alrighty, so, I've been doing web design and web programming for going on three years now. So this may sound like the n00best of n00b questions.I've been assigned a project where, in one week, I have to have a mock up of the site. Now, I've heard of mark up, but never mock up.What is mock up?

[chibineku]

The term usually just means a sketch version of something, outlining the major design and structure, without much attention paid to the finer details. So, you might use the 960 grid system to make a quick layout, probably use pretty poor and excessive markup to get things to look sort of right, and then hammer out the details and validation later. It's a stepping off point for client and designer to get a feel for the direction they want to go in before you spend weeks producing nice clean code for them to say they really would rather a fixed layout instead of elastic, or they hate the horizontal nav, now that they've seen it. I think some even make mockups in photoshop or similar packages - non-functioning, but you get the idea of layout and how pages link together.

[Synook]

Generally it is just a non-functional visual representation of the final product.

[jeffman]

A lot of people mean a PhotoShop image. Use screen shots to clip out images of buttons and junk. Do the rest freehand. You're probably using PhotoShop anyway for custom doodads and banners and whatnot. The rest is just lines and rectangles.In some shops, a designer will do a mockup like this and then hand it to a developer and say, "Make it so."If they're up for powerpoint, different slides could show how it looks like when a menu is pulled down, etc. Assuming the page is dynamic at all.

[thescientist]

I often like to draw out my designs first, using some colored pencils even for color and effect. Saves some time staring at the computer, gets quick results too. It makes the amount of time I have to spend on the computer guessing what they want a little less arduous.