Sveltekit and Tailwindcss - create a rapid website prototype

Requirement gathering and user interface designing are two activities in software development practices. We invest significant time in these two activities. If you have worked on software development projects, you have noticed how long and ambiguous these two activities were. 

I searched on the Internet, read many software development books, and explored many software development processes to ease these two activities. But every time, I found them insufficient in real-world development.

Moreover, the client does not follow the rules. He wants to see the pages now. He wants to see how we develop the project without missing any important details or requirements. The list goes on. You can understand the pain if you are from a software development background.

That is where rapid prototyping comes in. It helps you to build a quick working website using default values without breaking the flow. It does not have a living database.

I prefer building e-commerce websites using the Drupal framework and CMS websites using the Joomla framework. You see that two do not allow you to create quick templating. You need to invest hours to build a prototype.

Recently, as part of my regular learning, I came across SvelteKit. It is a superb and easy component-based framework. I liked the idea. I knew I was not using it on the production websites, but I could use it in creating rapid prototypes for my clients. And it worked.

Now, I am using SvelteKit and Tailwindcss for all my custom website prototyping works. My clients are happy, and I can reuse the UI components without losing productivity.

Why these two frameworks?

Sveltekit is a simple Javascript website framework based on Svelte – a reactive user components library. You can use it to build interactive complex websites without worrying about the back-end language. You can use Javascript or Typescript language for all of your development works.

Tailwindcss is a CSS utility-based framework that allows you to create complex user interfaces without even writing CSS styles.

Why does requirement-gathering activity matter?

I have been developing software since 2006 and have learned many languages and frameworks. I went through from simple to complex projects. That is why I know the importance of requirement gathering and user interface design activities in software development.

Nowadays, I only work on e-commerce and CMS development. My main focus is to develop beautiful websites for my clients. From here onward, when I refer to development activity, you should consider it a website development activity.

These two activities require detailed input from the client, and the communication takes a long time to conclude. And still, you find some gaps in the requirements.

The user interface designing activity has different problems. Most of the time, the client does not know about the designer jargon, and they fail to understand each other.

So here I found the solution.

Create a demo static site using Sveltekit and Tailwindcss framework.

At this point, you need to understand that we do not want to integrate the dynamic features. But we need to give a demo using the static content. Also, we need to create user interfaces that we can easily use in any other back-end frameworks. As part of the bigger picture, I keep a user interface design that I can easily reuse on Drupal themes and Joomla templates.  

You can start creating Svelte user components and routing for different pages. You can read the Sveltekit document to learn the details.

Upload the static site for the demo.

SvelteKit has a command to generate a static site. Having generated a static site, you can configure it on any subdirectory or domain on the staging site. It includes images, CSS, JavaScript files, and static content.

You are ready to give a demo.

You can email or call the customer and ask him to look at the staging site. He or his team can review the landing page and give you valuable feedback. Since all contents are static and you are creating user components, you will not have any problem updating the static site in no time from here onward.

You can hire our rapid website prototype service If you have a website idea and do not want to invest too much on the live site.

Conclusion.

I have tried other methods for generating quick prototypes but failed miserably. These two frameworks have given me fast results. We are happy to have these two in our development process.

In a nutshell,

- My team can create a user interface quickly without throwing any written code. Because the client has confirmed the design while looking at static content.

- My client can see the changes in a short time. And he can comment on the actual design that goes into production.

- It generates all user components in separate files. And my team can easily copy them into any back-end framework. And it works.

I am going to use these two frameworks for all my upcoming projects.