Basic Wireframe Tool – Free PDF Download
(website) wireframe
- a basic visual guide used in interface design to suggest the structure of a website and relationships between its pages – Wikipedia
Wireframes are a great way to get ideas out into the open quickly for discussion. You obviously don’t need anything fancy to create a basic wireframe or idea sketch (heck, a stick and patch of dirt work fine!), but we’ve found that adding a little browser chrome really helps to facilitate the process and communicate the rough ideas more clearly to a broader audience.
You can download our tool for creating wireframes for free here:
And here are a few basic principles for creating successful wireframes:
- Take a layered approach. Start by thinking about the general flow of your website or application, outlining the main actions and user experience first. Then move to more detailed sketches, creating basic layouts for each of the individual pages.
- Don’t be too literal. Your wireframes will provide the most value if they are quick sketches done in succession–broad strokes to capture main ideas, not detail oriented designs. Your pixel-perfect designs will come later.
- Embrace the power of iteration. Paper is cheap, and although you don’t want to be wasteful, going through a few sheets at this stage of the process will save boatloads later on in the process. Don’t be afraid to sketch out a half-baked idea to see where it leads. Ask for feedback, then incorporate that feedback into your sketches. Read about usability, and follow best practices for those techniques which are commonplace and need to be recognizable and easy for users. Build upon early sketches.
- Remove all unnecessary elements. Once you’re happy with the direction things are headed, look back over the designs to see if you really need every part of the design. Chances are you have an unnecessary feature or two that doesn’t add enough value to justify keeping. If this is the case, remove it early on (trust me, it will be much easier to start development, and, surprisingly, your users will thank you later when you give them a simple interface!).
So start sketching! You don’t have to be an illustrator, or even in the design business to gain from sketching out your ideas. If you’ve got a website and sense that some aspect should be made simpler or easier to use, use this basic wireframe tool to communicate your idea to your web developer! They’ll thank you for the clear communication.
Best WordPress Modifications: Article2pdf
Say you want to offer your website content as a downloadable PDFs. A typical process for this might include:
- Copy and paste all of your content into a Word document
- Export as PDF
- Upload to your website
- Modify page to include link to PDF
It seems simple enough, but one can quickly see the drawbacks of using this manual method (ex. possible errors at all stages, can’t upgrade look of documents without recreating each individually, far too many steps to be doing on a regular basis…).
FPDF
However, if you’re using a content management system you can very easily automate the entire process. The key is to use a PDF creation library such as FPDF. This free library (the F in FPDF stands for “free”) is easy to use and allows you to create standard PDF documents using nothing more than a few lines of PHP.
Article2pdf
If you’re using WordPress the process is even simpler. Article2pdf is a free plugin from Marc Schieferdecker that utilizes the FPDF library. The installation process is like all other WordPress plugins, and it comes with several configuration options and good documentation.
To use Article2pdf, you simply create a template PDF that serves as the basis for all of your PDFs to be generated. The plugin does the rest of the work in adding the content to your template design. With the ability to create template files, I’ve found that I can control nearly everything about the look of the PDFs that I need to. Of the few things I’ve changed within the plugin code itselft, all were cosmetic details that bugged me as a designer–I could have lived without making any changes if I was willing to accept a slightly less refined look in the end.
So quit manually generating PDFs for everything on your website–with FPDF and Article2pdf you can completely automate the process and use the hours saved to generate more great content for your users!
Best WordPress Modifications: WP-Database-Backup
WP-Database-Backup (plugin) – This amazing little plugin takes care of backing up your mysql database, allowing instant or scheduled backups to automate the process and ensure that this important task actually gets completed with regularity. WP-Database-Backup only takes care of the database content (the backup is in the format of an sql dump) so you’ll have to take care of images, themes, plugins, etc. with a different method, but it allows you to sleep peacefully knowing that your clients’ content is safe!
You can find WP-Database-Backup here. Thanks to Austin Matzko for such a great modification to WordPress!
Dropbox
For the past few weeks we’ve been using a folder sharing service called Dropbox. While there are many alternatives to using an online hosted service such as this one, Dropbox fit all of our requirements:
- Easy to use for computer experts and novices alike
- Cross-platform (Flint Hills Design is Mac based, most clients use PCs)
- Easy to backups
- Minimal resource requirements (individual computers and network)
- 24/7 access
Basically, we needed a reliable file sharing application that we could control as we see fit. Dropbox met all these requirements. Some other options didn’t:
- Web App
We thought about creating our own web app, but hundreds already exist and we didn’t have time. Plus, most of the existing apps such as Basecamp provided many more features than we really needed (simplicity is one of our most basic guiding principles). - MobileMe
We’ve found MobileMe to be flaky, especially for some of our PC using clients. We really needed this to be bulletproof. - File Sharing
The Apple based file sharing was a possibility, but if a computer is turned off you’re out of luck. And it didn’t seem right to be tying up others’ computers and their internet connections every time another user requests a file. - Dedicated Linux Server
Probably a good option, but we didn’t want to hassle with the configuration or security issues…
So in the end Dropbox won out. It’s easy to use and install on all operating systems. Because it looks and acts like a regular folder on our hard drive, everything is backed up automatically (and dropbox provides a time-machine style online backup as yet another measure of safety). It’s always on and doesn’t consume precious computing resources due to our files being hosted on Dropbox servers. And best of all it’s free for accounts under 2GB! From our experience so far we’d recommend it to anyone.
