Speed Up Your Web Design Workflow Tip #2 – Project Templating

Starting a new project can be exciting for web designers. A fresh canvas on which to create your latest work of art. Unfortunately it’s never that straightforward. There’s a lot more to a web project than just designing. If you’re a freelancer you might be faced with the task of brainstorming, creating wireframes and mockups, slicing PSDs, building layouts in HTML/CSS and integrating these with some type of CMS.

Starting a new project can be a mundane task

This is all very repetitive. One of the best ways to combat this, is to build up a library of templates for yourself. Now when I say build a library I don’t mean steal fully built templates and claim they’re your own. I mean build up a library of base templates. Kick-starters!

Depending on the way you work you’ll have a good idea of what you need for each project e.g. you might need a skeleton WordPress theme which has only what you need. Enter Structurer Pro!

A few months ago I bought Structurer Pro, a project templating GUI, from CodeCanyon. It turned out to be a great buy for only $5. Its ended up doing a lot of my work for me and has really improved my workflow.

For example, I no longer have to go to WordPress.org or the HTML5 Boilerplate site and click the download button. I can simply click the Structurer Pro icon on my menu bar and choose what framework I want to download. Structurer Pro then begins downloading and once it finishes, it automatically unzips the download file to a directory of your choice. Now you’re ready to go!

You can also create your own project templates using Structurer’s File Contents Manager. As you can see in the image below you have the ability to manage each of your project templates. It’s here that you can get all your favorite frameworks ready for easy download. I’ve hooked up Bones, CodeIgniter and WordPress to name a few.

I’m just scratching the surface here. In the short video below, Jeffrey Way gives a very detailed demo of what Structurer Pro can do.

I use this app everyday and find it so convenient that I don’t have to browse the web to download my favorite frameworks. Setting up your own project templates takes time because you have to think about what you need. In the long run though, it’s well worth the investment.

Just like my last article, this app is only for Mac. Luckily there is also a similar program available for Windows — Blueprinter.