Lately I’ve been dealing with a lot of small client work. Most projects aren’t even over $100, but when they take an average of 45 minutes to an hour and a half to complete, it really adds up… especially as I’ve been leveraging my growing reputation over at WickedFire in their IRC chat to find a constant influx of quick jobs after a client had no choice but to leave half-way through a project I was depending on more than I should have been. Such is life.

One great tool I’ve found to make demos of layouts and landing pages effortless is a new site called Coded Preview. You don’t even need an account to use the service, but you can store your demoed layouts when you do have an account, or even come back to edit them later, such as when a client asks for a quick revision.

You simply upload the demo file (you can password-protect it), set a few settings to deal with the alignmet, demo’s title, and background color or image, and voila! It took me 7 seconds to get my demo made on my last project, I counted. It goes even more quickly if you download the desktop app.

I’m usually not one to push a product, but Coded Preview is new and I think will help a lot of people save time in the designing pocess, rather than making your own preview pages for the web. My clients have been impressed with how quickly I can get a demo online and re-uploaded after edits are made. When your main advantage as a freelancer is your speed of quality production, every little bit counts.

Here’s a few layouts I’ve uploaded that you can see:

• A demo for Football Bio, my personal project that is meant to make it easier for football (soccer) teams to manage themselves, since all of mine currently use email or Facebook to cmmunicate. Hardly efficient, especially for sharing maps.
• Another demo of Football Bio, this time showing the news and discussion section, modeled after the simplicity in design of Hacker News, which allows the complexity of the content to really shine, encouraging intelligent and civilized conversation, which is my goal. I want to capture users’ attention for times when they are not using the management aspect of the site, since the purpose of that core feature is to reduce the time spent gathering information. I think it’s a solid blend.
• A template design for a mock web hosting company made for my buddy Marco’s new service which i about to be released, PSD Scoop. It’s going to be a service that sells PSD templates for all sorts of sites and topics, like blog themes, video galleries, shopping carts, etc. I’m sure they’ll have a great price-point. I think it turned out very solid.

What do you think of Coded Preview? Will you use it?