Axure as a wireframing & prototyping tool It’s unfortunate, but I would be willing to wager that the grand majority of websites out there are a total short-circuit of any type of sensible planning & prototyping cycle.   After a recent visit to Boxes & Arrows,  I stumbled across an ad for Axure, a piece of software designed for the whole wireframe & prototype portion of the web development cycle. 

It made me reflect on how much my own methodology has changed through the years, in terms of the production line for a website, and how it makes its way from an idea in your head, through to a finished product that people use. 

 

Pre-Photoshop era:

image When I was first making websites back in ‘95-‘96, the idea had not even entered my head that I could design my site in Photoshop and then actually make the item that I designed.  Design tools were so primitive, and table support so bad & varied, that you couldn’t just make a design and know that you could execute whatever you designed.  It was only with IE 3 that you could finally do tables with a background image (a revelation), and both Netscape and IE implemented that differently.  

So, in any case, my prototyping environment at that time was something called Microsoft Visual Notepad [jk].

It was only after I first tried Macromedia Fireworks in 1999, and was then able to hack up a fully-designed page and output it as HTML and images, that I decided that prototyping might be more entertaining than programming 5 bad websites in a row before finally getting it right.

Working out the production line:

All of that said, through quite a bit of pain and bad websites, I finally ended up with a production line that worked.  I, of course, didn’t make this all up on my own, as I had hit the books pretty hard trying to find out who had workable systems and methodologies that worked.   

In terms of best references with respect to the website production line, here’s what I found to be the best resources:

  1. Communicating Design by Dan Brown (not the Angels & Demons Dan Brown – a different one) This has probably the single best explanation of the various sub-products and deliverables that go into planning out a website.  A truly awesome reference that anyone – even web developers and Photoshop d00ds should read. 
  2. Planning by Product – the Targets & Goals Booklet by L. Ron Hubbard:  A free course you can take on-line, which gives you the basics on how to plan and organize any product or activity, and see it through to completion.
  3. Lynda.com has a great video on the website planning & development process, with tools and tricks you can use to communicate the design better to the development team.