A couple months ago my wife's day job started shopping for a new website. They got a few quotes, then asked me. Prior to walking into the meeting, I framed out

A couple months ago my wife's day job started shopping for a new website. They got a few quotes, then asked me. Prior to walking into the meeting, I framed out the front end using Bootstrap, built a simple CMS to convey my ideas and had a few sample pages laid out how I envisioned redoing things and I got the job (one of my biggest $$$$$ jobs to date) Now obviously, being married to an employee, I had some insider knowledge, but I'm 1 person compared to some of the quotes they got from companies with armies of programmers. IMO, showing the customer (or investor) is night and day different than telling the customer. You don't have to do a lot; I spent < 10 hours on the demo - but it was something they could use / play with (I left them the URL of the test site) and talk about amongst themselves. Anyways, like I said; I prototype in Bootstrap - it offers a lot of nifty features that provide nice eye candy (modals, tooltips, button bars, etc...). My backends are always in PHP so I wrote the CMS in that. Do you need PHP, Ruby, etc... in a demo? no, probably not, but it wont hurt to learn it for communicating whoever you take on as a tech person. jQuery is a must now a days; everyone wants it even if they don't know what it is exactly. Ruby or PHP or Python are a matter of opinion I think. Some people hate PHP, I love PHP and hate Ruby. All a matter of what you need to get the job done IMO.