We are in the process of launching a new collaboration center for a confederation of non-profit organizations. The key ingredient to this new collaboration center is that it must be easy to navigate (yet have tons of features and functionality).
So, knowing that site navigation and the site`s information architecture are keys to success, we have spent a fair amount of time building wireframes of the site, making sure that we get the site well organized and easy to navigate BEFORE moving to the "pretty pictures" and "rounded corners" design phase. In the past, we would have used PowerPoint to construct these wireframes. But while I love PowerPoint for most things, this is a task it is not specifically designed for. So a month ago, I did a quick search for "wireframe tools" and to my delight, found that there is a whole set of providers of this type of functionality.
Long story short, I began using iPlotz (http://iplotz.com/) and I am here to tell you... it is absolutely worth the $15 a month service fee. I won`t bore you with all the product details (since their demo does a good job of that), but I will tell you that this solution has saved me a ton of aggravation using tools not built for this activity, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has to design a site and collaborate with others online about the design.
Brett
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Imported/Syndicated Blog Original Publish Date : Thu, Dec 3, 2009