As a developer, I have very little involvement with client interaction in the beginning stages of a web design/development project. But many decisions that are made early on have a huge impact on how smooth sailing my job will be once the project is handed off from the designers. Of course I am quite engaged in our team brainstorming sessions about functionality and features that will eventually be on the site. But most of the early back-and-forths with clients are focused on the look and feel of a site.

For the last few months we have been refining our process of coming to design decisions and creating mockups. I am excited to be made more of a part of this, as I hope it will take out some of the road bumps in the development phase of our web projects. Several unformed ideas for improvements have been rattling around in my head for a while now and last week a few things happened to knock them into place. We needed a way to present mockups to clients that would: 1) allow them to see their potential websites as we intend them to be –in a web browser–, while 2) be as easy and as fast as attaching jpgs to emails for the design team.

So now Nick and I are working on building a system with the following specs:

• Lightweight: To “install” the mockup manager, the designer just has to copy an index.php page and 3 supporting files to the client folder on our demo server
• Foolproof: For each round of mockups, the designer will simply drag and drop a folder (named the current date in MM-DD-YYYY format) containing the mockups to the server using their FTP client.
• User-friendly: The homepage will display a list of thumbnails, grouped by the date of revisions, newest at the top of the page. When a client clicks on an image, they are taken to a page displaying the full-sized image centered in their browser window. They can click anywhere on the screen to proceed to the next mockup. At the top of each page a small navigator bar will allow the user to navigate to the homepage, previous mockup, and next mockup.

We’re hoping to have this ready to roll out in the next month or so! Here’s a sneak peek: