I’ve been involved in building a big new fitness platform and one of the lessons I’ve learnt along the way is that the development process is much easier if you pre plan as much as possible before briefing the developer.

If you are building a site and want a smooth process with the developer figure is a great online tool that lets you map out and lay out your website before you start doing any briefing.

By mapping the functionality early it brings out many aspects of the site that potentially need discussion and agreement – and also reveals things that aren’t particularly working well – once they get onto a real webpage. The great thing about Figma is that there are plenty of resources around the world that are really expert at it and can give you some great advice.

We eventually took a punt and use the guy based in the Ukraine to lay the site out for us. This felt a bit risky at the time but the guy did an absolutely awesome job and was really helpful in letting us visualise what the site would look like.

We found him on Upwork and he’s name is Stanislav Shcherbyn.I can’t recommend him highly enough he is awesome and doesn’t cost a fortune either.

The platform will even let you do fully clickable demos of the site to get a feel for the UI.

I’ve also used Figma to map out things like the flow of emails in a templated email funnel. So it’s incredibly versatile.