A common problem

Up until a couple of years ago, in order to mock up a site design, I loaded up Photoshop and began a rather time-consuming task of laying down the design's graphical elements and layout samples, which entailed managing text layers. However, this sometimes ended up being a very large amount of layers, most of which were just lots of text boxes filled with Lorem Ipsum sample text.

I'd show these mockups to the client and they'd make changes, which more often than not were just to the text in the mockup, not the overall layout or graphical interface. As my "standard design procedure" was to have the client approve the mockup before production, I'd find myself painstakingly plodding through all my Photoshop text layers, applying changes to show the mockup to the client again.

Sometimes, I would miss a small piece of text that should have been updated with other sets of text! This would confuse (or annoy) the client and they'd request another change! I guess they figured that as I had to make the change anyway, they might request a few more tweaks to the design as well, which again were usually more textual than graphical and took a bit of focus to keep track of.

The process of getting a design approved became tedious and, at times, drove me nuts. At one point, I considered dropping my design services and just focusing on programming and markup so that I wouldn't have to deal with it anymore.

Upon finally getting an approval and starting to produce the design comp into XHTML and CSS, no matter how good I got at CSS and envisioning how the CSS would work while I was mocking up the layout in Photoshop, I would inevitably include something in the layout that would turn out to be a bit harder than I thought I would reproduce with XHTML and CSS.

I was then saddled with two unappealing options—either go back to the client and get them to accept a more reasonable "reality" of the design or spend more time doing all sorts of tedious research and experimentation with the XHTML and CSS, to achieve the desired layout or other effect across all browsers and IE.