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

Working on launching one of our clients on our new OPENAssociations platform.  We have a UI design project that is relatively interesting.  We want to redo the design of our clients' current Plone site  and then carry that design over to our association management system and our social networking site.  Quite a nice little challenge.

We've developed a series of wireframes but now need the help of a talented UI designer to take us the final mile.  Experience with association sites (i.e. lots of dynamic content) and with Plone would definitely be a plus.

Do you know someone who might meet these vague requirements?  If so, let me know.

Cheers,

Brett

What is it about the word "Free" that turns us all into mindless, zombies at its mere mention?

Case in point, we are feverishly working on the relaunch of one of our clients onto our OPENAssociations platform.  It involves a ton of moving parts including installation of a new database, data migration to this new database, and single sign-on integration between multiple applications.  But the most daunting task, because it involves a little creativity and lots of hard work, is the development of a new design for the site. Since I have been through this many times, I know that the best designs take lots of time to develop, test, tweak, deploy, gather feedback, rinse, repeat, etcetera...

So why is it that I was drawn to a recent post that highlighted 35 Excellent Websites for Downloading Free CSS Templates?  Was it the word Free?  Was it the thought that a couple minutes of idle browsing would replace hours of thankless design and development work?  Yes, of course that was the appeal.  Free and Easy was the thought swirling through my head.

But alas, like everything labeled as Free, I just wound up wasting 10 minutes of clicking through a whole host of interesting designs, none of which would work at all for my project at hand.

So if you have a few "Free" moments, take a quick peek. For me, it is back to the drawing board.

Brett