I'd like to get feedback about how others have showcased different templates to clients that might work for a particular project?

I'm just starting out in web development and have my first 'good' client.

How have others gone about showing clients what their end product website might look like up front?
In the past I have simply done a basic layout in pdf and worked from there to hash out the details.

Feedback on this would be very useful for me.

Thanks Jason.

Hey Jason,

Id say this is probably a 64 million dollar question

In terms of a folio I would do some research and checkout some folios that you like from sites like webcreme.com and designshack.co.uk and basically gather some inspiration from there. Smashingmagaine.com is another good source of inspiration too.

You could set up some mock websites using the templates and put together some idea websites with dummy content of what the site would look like. I think that might work too.

Would be interesting to hear from others how they got their start too. For me early on it was really word of mouth as well as refining the type of client I wanted to work with that I found the biggest help.


Cheers Anthony

Thanks for those sites Anthony. A lot of useful information. Hope to hear from some others as well.

Hi jjohnston and Anthony,

I know when I first started out this was a huge problem, by the time I had done enough tweaks to the template to give the client an idea I had done most of the work.

Now I am either completely transparent and show some before and afters of templates and tell them to trust me, or just tell them to trust me from the outset if I want to keep the template remix thing under the rug.

If I do get their trust and ultimately the job I make sure I have a good heart to heart and get all the info I can, research the local industry and see what web designers OS are doing and then go for it. I have not been burnt yet.

Here is a before and after shot from my site, it give those with no imagination an idea of what possible. I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Ben.

Sounds like good advice Ben. Just be upfront with the client about the process and the kind of end product they can expect.

For me there is a lack of confidence in my web design skills that presents a barrier to being completely transparent with clients. At this time I know just enough joomla and basic coding to make straight forward changes to templates, but not enough to pull off the ideas that I have in mind.

But as they say fake it till you make it.

By the way thanks for sharing that redesign example Ben. It's an elegant looking site.

All the best jjohnston, your in good hands here at JB and the templates are very easy to work with.

I enjoy doing the industry research because it normally is confidence building, there is so many crappy sites out there!

See you around,

Ben.