Design in the browser sooner than feels comfortable

A mockup is a picture of a website at one screen size, with perfect content and nothing loading. It's a useful starting point and a misleading finish line.

What mockups hide

• How the layout behaves between the phone and desktop designs — which is where a lot of people actually are.
• What happens when a headline is twice as long, or someone uploads a portrait photo into a landscape slot.
• How it feels: transitions, loading states, fonts arriving late.
• Hover, focus and keyboard states, which rarely get drawn at all.

Move to code once the direction is set

Once the type, colour, spacing and a couple of key layouts are agreed, the next round of design can happen as a working page. Feedback gets more specific, because people react to something they can actually use instead of imagining it.

It also avoids a familiar trap: weeks spent perfecting a design file, then finding out the layout doesn't survive real content.

Mockups still have their place

Early exploration is faster in a design tool, and it's the right place to try five directions and throw four away. The point isn't to skip design. It's to stop treating the mockup as the product.

What it means if you're the client

You see something clickable sooner, often as a private link you can open on your own phone. Expect it to look rough in places at first. That's fine — fixing things there is much cheaper than fixing them after launch.