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.
The Great 2009 Flint Hills Design Koozie Giveaway
Thanks to all of you who came to our gathering after Bethel College’s Fall Fest football game. We appreciated having each and every one of our guests, and enjoyed the chance to hear more about what you are doing and share some of our work with you. We are also glad for all of the feedback and brainstorming that took place–some of you provided excellent ideas that will definitely influence our work in the future.
What Are You Talking About?
For those of you who have no idea what we’re talking about, we decided to have a little party. We invited around 150 of our close friends to come check out our new building and see what we were working on. We sent out the invites through nicely designed HTML emails and by creating a Facebook event:
HTML Email Invite
Facebook Event Invite
Tracking and Reports
We also decided to track the activity generated by the process, and then turn that into a very brief report that we could give to interested attendees, to show one aspect of the work we do.
Tracking Report
We had such a great time that we’re planning on making this an annual event, so if you weren’t able to make it hopefully you can join us next year!
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!
Free as a Business Model
I enjoyed this interview with Chris Anderson on his latest book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. For many of us working in the digital world, the ideas in Free aren’t necessarily new, but he does present them in a clear way. I think that “freemium” can be a very effective business model for companies capable of producing worthwhile digital content and should not be ignored in marketing efforts.
Anderson is providing an unabridged audiobook for free; the abridged version is available for purchase.
