How I prototype a Web Page

A quick look at a simple workflow I use to prototype a web page

Sometimes I work on single web pages for my projects.

Maybe I want to redesign the blog. Maybe it’s a landing page for a new project.

This is the process I use.

I like to use Tailwind to build prototypes.

I set up all the pipeline for Tailwind and PostCSS first:

Create postcss.config.js:

const purgecss = require('@fullhuman/postcss-purgecss')
const cssnano = require('cssnano')

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    require('tailwindcss'),
    require('autoprefixer'),
    cssnano({ preset: 'default' }),
    purgecss({
      content: ['./layouts/**/*.html', './src/**/*.vue', './src/**/*.jsx'],
      defaultExtractor: content => content.match(/[\w-/:]+(?<!:)/g) || []
    })
  ]
}

Create tailwind.config.js:

module.exports = {
  theme: {},
  variants: {},
  plugins: [],
}

Craete a tailwind.css file:

@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;

Create a package.json file:

{
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "build:css": "postcss tailwind.css -o output.css",
    "watch": "watch 'npm run build:css' ./layouts"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "@fullhuman/postcss-purgecss": "^1.3.0",
    "autoprefixer": "^9.7.1",
    "cssnano": "^4.1.10",
    "postcss": "^7.0.21",
    "tailwindcss": "^1.1.3",
    "watch": "^1.0.2"
  }
}

Create a layouts/index.html page, and add your HTML.

Start a terminal shell, go to the project folder and run:

npm run watch

Then I make the browser automatically sync the changes every time I save the page or the CSS is regenerated, using browser-sync, a great utility you can install using npm install -g browser-sync:

browser-sync start --server --files "."

This starts a server and also automatically opens the browser and points at the newly created local web server.

Now I open VS Code and the browser side by side, and I start prototyping!