For several weeks now I have been using Wireframsketcher to do the wire framing for the new Incolo website. Wireframsketcher has been a fast, easy, and fun way to create the initial looks of a new website. Granted that this is my first time doing any wireframing so this review is taken from the perspective of an individual that has no prior experience with other wireframing software.
The first thing that many new people would be interested to know is that Wireframsketcher is not a stand alone product. You need to download Eclipse which is a coding environment and Wireframsketcher is an addon that you run within Eclipse. The installation is pretty straight forward and the Wireframsketcher website provides easy to use instructions.
The thing I like about Wireframsketcher is that it has a very low learning curve. All the icons are clearly categorized into larger buckets and within several minutes I found myself creating the barebones of a website. Once I had all the elements laid out I was able to bulk pdf export all my images. They were even exported within the same folder structure in Eclipse, which made sharing with others easier.
Even though Wireframsketcher saved me a ton of time conceptualizing my website there are still a couple things I would like to have seen. Firstly, it would be nice to have some sort of global template that would permeate through all my images. This way if I change the wording in my navigation or add an additional link to my footer, I wouldn’t have to update all my pages individually. Secondly, I would like to see a community icon library. For the most part I found what I needed or I could easily substitute a placeholder for something specific, but having a community shared library of thousands of designer graphics would add a pop to Wireframsketcher. Lastly this might not even be Wireframsketcher thing rather an issue with Eclipse, but multiple times after working in Eclipse for several hours elements would get stuck and I wasn’t able to click out of it anywhere. I would have to close down Eclipse and restart it before it returned back to normal.
All in all for my first wireframe software I was able to do what I want and the learning curve was really low. What other wireframing software are you using?
