Many of the clients I see understand the power and importance of marketing their product or service through the world wide web. However, very few of them have the knowledge, technical skills and creative flair to be able to produce a professional website. In quite a few cases they have been worried about how to explain to a professional website designer what they are trying to achieve.
Thanks to an interview on Leo Laport’s net@night podcast I have discovered a possible solution. It is called Balsamiq Mockups and comes from a ‘one man band’ company Balsamiq Studios, founded by an ex-Google employee Giacomo “Peldi” Guilizzoni. Despite have returned home to Italy to start his business he has managed to sell $100,000 of his $79 software in five months.
As Giacomo says:
“Using Balsamiq Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it’s digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner. Teams can come up with a design and iterate over it in real-time in the course of a meeting. With more than 60 pre-built controls to choose from, you can design anything from a super-simple dialog box to a full-fledged application, from a simple website to a Rich Internet Application.”
He has created an excellent two minute demonstration video showing what the software can do.
