On Internet Business

Productivity Tools Review

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources, Online Retail

It’s not everyday that you need to build a form or mock-up a software application, but when you do, it’s important to have the kit to enable you to work swiftly and effectively. Three that can really help are Formsite, Balsamiq and Cacoo:

Formsite is flexible and simple to learn – it’s an HTML form builder that allows the user to create anything from a customer survey to an order form or an employment application process. You can work from a template or start with a ‘blank page’ and tailor the form or survey to your own needs and because the form is stored on the Formsite server, you don’t have to install or download anything so it’s good for work on the move. Their most recent addition is a Spam protection facility that stops robots from completing your forms and distorting results.

Priced in dollars, starting with free access which offers a strictly limited range of forms and responses, and rising through $10, to $100 per month, for extras like consulting and customisation it’s a fully flexible system that allows form-building to be simple and response reporting to be an effective part of your business.

Balsamiq is priced at $79.99 although there is a free demo version you can download to play around with, that demo doesn’t have a save function, for which you need to have paid for a licence key. Obviously if you’re just ‘doodling’ software with your team, the free version may be enough for you as Balsamiq allows you to create software mockups using drag and drop and editing tools that appear on the desktop. It’s a really simple system to learn, and can allow you to brainstorm with a client or team from first principles, so that when an idea comes up while you’re on the road or just grabbing a quick coffee, you can start work immediately using the pre-made elements to offer an instant visual.

There is perhaps one annoyance: to ensure that customers don’t think that putting together a mockup is the same as coding software, Balsamiq has opted to keep the system in a kind of hand-drawn, low-fi style which can look a little odd.

Cacoo is a free web app that allows you to work through your Cacoo.com account to create diagrams like site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. It also allows for real time collaboration and users can upload their own images and create freehand line-work. It’s a relatively new system which means that it doesn’t, as yet, have a ‘premium’ option for paying users, although that’s due to come by the middle of this year. It would be good if that premium payment allowed users to export files on formats other than PNG and to save files to Autocad formats.

Perhaps the biggest weakness of the current system is that it lacks an import feature, meaning that all files have to be created from scratch from within the Cacoo space.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.