: What wireframing tools can produce something that looks like a finished website? I've long done this using photoshop, but lacking photoshop skills this takes me ages and is little more than a

@Jessie594

Have you tried Axure RP? That's the tool of choice for conception and UX/UI folks in larger agencies. Creates clickable html prototypes and can look like a finished product, your mileage may vary though. It really depends on how much time you actually put into the design of your prototype.

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@Karen161

I use Illustrator - NOT Photoshop, as that is for editing photos.....

I find illustrator perfect for mocking up very close to complete website layouts as its vector based, you can apply fades to vectors, shadows etc etc, in a very similar way to how a browser would render it.

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@Phylliss660

I really like Fireworks. It's similar to Photoshop and also by Adobe, but is more suited for website mockup and mobile designs.

If you look at their templates (click File->New From Template) there are wireframes for jquery, iphone, ipad, and some sample web design layouts. They also have a Common Library with menus and design elements that you can drag and drop into place.

You can get a month free right now with their Adobe CS6 Cloud offer. Hate sounding like an advertisement, but it's worth checking out if you want the final wireframe to look like a real website.

This is a wireframe I'm working on for an application I'm writing. I'm more of a programmer than designer. I may use this just to measure pixel widths. It may end up as a WPF app... I'm not sure, but this has been a great way to get started.

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@Si4351233

Try Twitter Bootstrap 2

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@Bryan171

As John has mentioned, wireframing tools should not design a finished layout, although having said that there are many advocates of the idea that we should do away with wireframes and move to designing in the browser, which is kind of what you are talking about.

A quick and nasty way to do this would be to use an IDE like Dreamweaver which has all the elements in a drag and drop style, but this will leave you with crappy code.

My suggestion would be to use CSS, HTML and JavaScript frameworks to create your mockup site, good frameworks can do most of the legwork for you and you will have something to work with once the 'wireframe' is signed off.

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