Current WYSIWYG web design software

[ykgoh]

From 2000 to 2010, Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Flash MX was the de facto web design IDE tool of professional web designers.

I am wondering now in 2016, with responsive web design, what is/are the main tools that modern professional web designers are using to lay out, prototype and visualise the resulting design.

Do they muck around with the HTML codes like what web developers and programmers are doing with a simple text editor? And refresh the web browser to see the changes.

 

[davidktw]

From 2000 to 2010, Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Flash MX was the de facto web design IDE tool of professional web designers.

I am wondering now in 2016, with responsive web design, what is/are the main tools that modern professional web designers are using to lay out, prototype and visualise the resulting design.

Do they muck around with the HTML codes like what web developers and programmers are doing with a simple text editor? And refresh the web browser to see the changes.

It seems web design is no longer just a matter of layout anymore. Today my understanding is there are wireframe software taking shape as the visualisation instead of the final output. Instead you find rapid prototyping software or services like https://atomic.io, or https://www.sketchapp.com being popular

Due to the involvement of dynamic piecewise design for SPA using technologies like ajax, websocket, html5 canvas, etc, it is increasingly hard to layout things before hand. Rather prototyping provides story boarding for clients to see the overall design and the actual final output be speaking for itself.

Some of these prototyping software also utilised popular HTML frameworks like Bootstrap so the conversion from a prototype to an actual HTML framework is incremental, instead of the need to perform HTML slicing and conversion.

Unfortunately the fast growing nature of rich client side technologies will make it harder for a software to do everything in place like it was in the past where dynamic-ness happens in the server end only. It seems now I have not really observe that web designer can just do web design at the surface layer without getting involved with something more in-depth like scripting, and even deeper like integrating with the server side as part of the scope of work to deliver the holistic application. Hence anything less are just really good for prototyping and storyboarding at the moment.

 

[jaysenko]

speed is everything

It seems web design is no longer just a matter of layout anymore. Today my understanding is there are wireframe software taking shape as the visualisation instead of the final output. Instead you find rapid prototyping software or services

Due to the involvement of dynamic piecewise design for SPA using technologies like ajax, websocket, html5 canvas, etc, it is increasingly hard to layout things before hand. Rather prototyping provides story boarding for clients to see the overall design and the actual final output be speaking for itself.

Some of these prototyping software also utilised popular HTML frameworks like Bootstrap so the conversion from a prototype to an actual HTML framework is incremental, instead of the need to perform HTML slicing and conversion.

Unfortunately the fast growing nature of rich client side technologies will make it harder for a software to do everything in place like it was in the past where dynamic-ness happens in the server end only. It seems now I have not really observe that web designer can just do web design at the surface layer without getting involved with something more in-depth like scripting, and even deeper like integrating with the server side as part of the scope of work to deliver the holistic application. Hence anything less are just really good for prototyping and storyboarding at the moment.

I agree with most of what you shared. and speed is everything to consumers.