Try and ditch Photoshop and Illustrator if you’re making a web app. siteInspire is hardly a complex design but I didn’t touch either once apart from creating assets. Having no training in design, they feel like such old fashioned tools to me, and there’s a lot to be said for just diving in and creating everything in HTML and CSS from the outset.
Having been through a similarly exhausting redesign of CycleLove recently, I'd go a step further, and apply this principle to the design of pretty much any website.
Which reminds me of Jason Fried's number one reason to skip Photoshop:
You can’t click a Photoshop mockup. They aren’t real. Paper isn’t real either, but paper doesn’t have that expectation. A Photoshop mockup is on your screen. If it’s on your screen it should work. You can’t pull down menus in a Photoshop mockup, you can’t enter text into a field in a Photoshop mockup, you can’t click a link in a Photoshop mockup. HTML/CSS, on the other hand, is the real experience.
Posted to graphic-design in 2013.