Prototyping a web application
When you need to create a mock-up for a web application, how do you choose to proceed?
This is an interesting question someone recently asked me. What's the best way to prototype a web application which will be implemented in ASP.NET in the end. Roughly I can think about two ways:
- use plain HTML
- use ASP.NET and ASPX files
The choice is not that easy to make because both options
have pros and cons.
For example, using HTML is much
easier for someone who masters it, while asking that same
person to use Visual Studio and ASP.NET is not really
possible because the learning curve is still too high.
The
prototyping phase requires the developer to be responsive,
as much exchanges with the client as possible, and to go
back and forth between the development and the sketching
board. I feel that asking the dev to prototype in Visual
Studio may add an extra burden to him/her. However, an HTML
mock-up is mostly disposable, because we cannot simply
rename the .html files to .aspx. To convert an HTML mock-up
into an ASP.NET app requires much more work than this.
Almost all the tags need to be reviewed, except of course
for everything which is pure design such as tables, divs and
CSS. That last point being true of course if you use CSS at
the prototyping level. Otherwise you'll also have to
clean-up the style stuff from the HTML tags and move it to a
clean CSS file.
This shows that the time we gain if we
use HTML can be lost when the time to switch to ASP.NET
comes. Mock-ups done in ASP.NET can be easily reused as a
base for the real application's UI which makes that solution
more valueable. Also you'd have better time using ASP.NET if
you need to have at least a bit of dynamic data or dynamic
behaviour. If you do that with HTML, you'd have to do a lot
of tricks with Javascript which can pollute your markup a
lot.
For someone who masters ASP.NET, coding the
mock-up directly with Visual Studio seems to be the best
choice.
How do YOU create your mock-ups? Who does it? Developers?
Maybe tools like Dreamweaver MX are a good compromise for a mix between HTML and ASPX. Some experiences this way?