If you want to study the layout of a Website & see the ‘big picture’ by tuning out the detail, instead of the usual focus on the narrow individual parts of Web pages, then you need a wireframe tool, & Wirify is just that. It’s easy to install & use since it’s a bookmarklet, which means you can create your wireframe while you’re browsing.
By employing this tool & sitting back & getting the big picture from a Website, you can study Web pages & their building blocks, the relationships between them, & you can more easily concentrate on the design, or consider a redesign of a Site. Besides helping you learn a great many things, it’s also a teaching tool, letting you deeply analyze page layouts, & other things like golden ratio, visual hierarchy, symmetry, white space, etc.
The bookmarklet is free, & the way to install it is by dragging a link you’ll find on Wirify’s Web page to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar, then from any Website that you want to convert into a wireframe, you just click the bookmark & you’re all set. You can then save your wireframe as an image capture by using your favorite screen capture utility on Chrome or Firefox.
If you’re really serious about wireframes, you might want to check out the ‘Pro’ version, which lets you export wireframes in vector format, which you can edit in Illustrator, Visio, Balsamiq & other popular image editing programs. With Wirify Pro you can also view & export headings with your wireframes & tweak your layouts directly in a browser. You can buy it by obtaining credits here at US $6 each, with each credit letting you export one wireframe as an editable file.
The product is the brainchild of Volkside’s founder, Jussi Pasanen who was born in Finland, but is currently based in Australia. Wirify has been around since 2010 & is based on open source software: jQuery, Retrospectiva & others. Volkside is also involved in the development of a number of other interesting software projects, like Naview, a navigation prototype designer, Kilter, a team-based project management tool & Tweetpond, an ‘ambient’ visualization tool for Twitter.
– This post is merely a startup profile based on publicly available information & not a review. –
Image Credit: Wirify
