March 2009 – Breanna Cooke

I’ve been reading a lot of articles about Twitter, but this one is “The Ultimate Guide to Twitter” from WebdesignerDepot.com.

I’ve also been reading various articles about the uses of Twitter:

“10 Examples of Creative Twittter Uses”

Examples of Twitter Help

I wanted to add my own example of how Twitter can help:

I had been working in the Microsoft Dynamic CRM 4.0 to implement html email templates, but was having a lot of trouble. Various forums indicated that there are email marketing add-ons to the CRM. So I went back to Microsoft’s site to see if they offered a solution.

After an live online chat with a rep on the MS CRM website, and an unsucessful phone call, I saw that they had a Twitter account. Knowing that people tend to respond faster on Twitter, I gave it a shot…and it worked! See my images below…

Twitter can be about people helping people, without the worry of emails lost in the junk folder, phone calls, and excessive formalities.

My question on Twitter to MS CRM

Example of a helpful response on Twitter.

I was recently introduced to some website prototyping software: Axure and Protoshare. The main difference is that Axure has to be installed and Protoshare is web-based. If you need some first-hand feedback on both, I’d recommend talking to the owner of ten24web.com, David Crouch, he’s tried both of them (but currently uses Axure). He was a big help to me! Thanks David!

I chose the trial of Protoshare because it is web-based. As a designer, the advantage of using this software is that you can lay out the site architecture and navigation before getting caught up in design, CSS, or HTML prototypes. But, you can add in your design and CSS later to give a pretty accurate prototype of the site before going into development. So far I’m really enjoying this because I don’t create hundreds of Photoshop layers to show variations, nor do I waste my time setting up an HTML page to show modest interactivity.

Protoshare
PROS:
– web-based, access anywhere
– clients can login to view and interact with prototype, section for adding comments
– easy drag and drop functionality for layout
– can apply CSS id and class tags to give accurate styling
– easy site-map creation

CONS:
– a little bit buggy, but their Support is very quick to respond 🙂

Links:

Month: March 2009

Website Prototypes