Draw Your UIs Completely Up Front

I've come to realize now that one of the fastest things I can do on a project is to draw up the XHTML/CSS stuff first, drawing out every page and admin page, before I even start work. Of course, if the client has a designer in mind, or can use who I recommend, that's great. But if they're cheap and cannot, then it's best if I start on every page.

I had this all wrong, really. I used to draw each part of the site as I went along, and then have these painful discoveries with the client where, once they visualized something, they would either have feature creep or explain that they messed up in the functional spec or were not clear enough or that I interpreted thing completely wrong. By drawing a UI all the way through and presenting it to the client, it makes the functional spec that much more clear.

At that point, building the site moves along much faster because it's just a matter of plugging in items into the backend database.