Twitter is a social media phenomenon. It has quickly overtaken MySpace and has Facebook firmly within it’s sights!. The biggest complaint from those using Twitter is that it is a time waster. First it is addicting, but there is not an application that I know of that can do anything about that. The real problem is that it isn’t easy to keep up with so many people and reply and retweet right there on the Twitter site. As people have discovered this to be the case, applications have been created to help make it easier and more efficient to navigate and use Twitter.

Tweet Deck is an example of one of these useful Twitter tools that have popped up on the horizon, thankfully. Tweet Deck is a free program that can be quickly downloaded and put to use immediately. Once you have the program downloaded and installed, you will have to fill in your Twitter user name and password so that the program can log in to your Twitter account. Every time you open Tweet Deck, it will automatically load your information from Twitter into your Tweet Deck. Once you are logged in and it is loaded, you can update your status, read other tweets and reply or retweet right there within Tweet Deck.

Tweet Deck also solves the issue of mobile tweeting. I have been using the iphone app for a year now and it works a charm. I also believe the Blackberry equivalent is useful too. No longer will you be on that long train journey wondering what Stephen Fry had for breakfast or what Jonathan Ross is feeding his Pug.

You may of wondered how a website gets made? It’s a good question and one that would take far too long to answer so I will spare you the technical jargon. What I can do though is give you an rough idea of how our website design process works.

Planning

We always get our prospective clients to fill out our Website Planner. This is a document with a series of questions aimed at giving us a basic idea of what the client is after. It would include questions such as:

“Please give a brief description of your business and what it is you do”

“What or Who is your target market?”

[..]

Balsamiq

When designing it is always important to keep on the look out for new applications that can assist in anyway. I recently came across a bit of a beauty; Balsamiq.

Producing wireframes for your web designs can sometimes be seriously long winded and laborious. I previously used Adobe Illustrator, which is really fantastic product but seriously heavy going and not really a package you can switch between. Balsmamiq is seriously lightweight and produces some really nice sketch like wireframes which i feel give it a really great look.

It also has great features that allow you design for different devices, such as iphones. You can use it to come up with software interface designs.

Clients seem to be responding to it well too, I was slightly concerened it’s sketch like feel may put some people off but so far so good.

Does anyone use another type of wireframer? Any success stories?