Wireframe Wonder to Speed Up Web Development

At this year’s NY Web 2.0 conference I found many well-known companies offering services like community applications, videocasting and server hardware. After a while, I thought I was going to leave the showroom empty handed, without any exciting technologies to write about.

That was until one booth caught my eye, demonstrating some sort of software to do web mockups (also called wireframes). To my surprise, it wasn’t software at all, but a web hosted application called ProtoShare.

I immediately sat down and asked for a demo. David DeAngelis, Director of Product Experience, told me a little bit about his company Site9, a group of dedicated engineers in Portland who developed this application and had recently launched it.

ProtoShare is a tool that enables the creation of wireframes. But not any wireframe, mind you, but actual, clickable and working, wireframes. In effect, these wireframes are HTML snippets that the user is able to drag and drop on his canvas. Combine them together, and you are half-way done with your website development. The tool is very valuable to organize your project on the inception stage, as it displays a sitemap at all times, which you can export with the touch of a button.

The tool is amazingly fast, it feels like a locally-installed software package, but it’s actually doing all its magic via AJAX and JavaScript. The tool has all the HTML elements you would need to design an application, like headers, text areas, form interaction and even drop-down XHTML menus.

Once you have a design, you can share it with co-workers, who have different access levels, from guests roles which can only add annotations to full-access engineers or product managers. All the notes are stored, so it serves as a history of your team’s thought process, eliminating those blame loops that can happen every so often.

Pricing is very reasonable, with a starter package of $25 per licensed user per month with 10 active projects, up to the unlimited plan which costs $49 per licensed user per month. Licensed users are those that will actually change the wireframes, the tool supports unlimited reviewer users (like for example folks from sales or marketing).

Because ProtoShare is a web application, there’s no software to install, and no updates. You can use it with pretty much any browser and allows you to come as close to your site as you can get without writing code, as it creates a basic, linkable template that allows you to preview usage flow and overall experience.

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