Wire-Framing, free online tools to organize your project

Most small websites do not need someone to do web architecture and wire-framing exercises to help get to the final product, a fully functioning 1-15 page website.  Especially only when you may need a simple CMS in the background.  Once in a while though, you will have to work on a large project, that you have to build your own framework for, everything custom.  This is when wire-framing your application is very useful and will help keep organization and keep everyone (even yourself) on the right track.  I will be briefly talking about a few wire-framing applications that I use, and guess what!, they’re free (to a certain extent).

Gliffy

Gliffy is usually what i first start with when getting a large application organized.

Creating a wireframe is a can help improve the vision for an entire web development team. Gliffy makes it pretty simple to create wireframes and then to share  your web mockups with anyone.

Gliffy has drag and drop elements from a tool library that you can put anywhere on the page. You can add text to wireframe to have a clear mockup.

Gliffy allows you to share and collaborate with anyone all online.  This is much easier to use between a diverse team, no need to have Viso installed on everyone machine, all you need is a browser and internet access. Team members can create, share, and edit your website wireframes.

With Gliffy you can publish your wireframe and share the URL with anyone, you can also export an image of your web wireframe or into a pdf document, and invite others to view and edit your wireframe online.

Overall if you need a wireframing tool for free, this could be the tool for you.

Hot Gloo

Hot Gloo is another Free web based “wire framing” application.  I usually will use Gliffy first to build out the framework then dive into Hot Gloo to put the actual pages together.  If the project is big enough I will sometimes show the client my mock ups of pages so they can get an idea and feel for what the site will look like and how it will work.  Of course these mock ups are unbranded and simple they give the client a place to change things around before it get out of hand.

Hot Gloo has drag and drop elements and allows you to create your own elements so you can reuse common includes like footers and headers for pages making mock ups much quicker to create.  Hot Gloo allows for collaberation as well. You can give users one of two different access points, Reviewer or Editor. You can invite other to see your ideas and alter them if you like, you can also chat through the Hot Gloo app.  You can export your pages through PDF’s or png’s too.  This free based application is only free up to a small certain amount of pages you can create.

For me Hot Gloo is a program that is more for mocking up pages or sections and not for wire framing, though you could use it for both.  I give Hot Gloo 4 out of 5 stars.