Domain Development Tools: Make Mockups In A Snap With Balsamiq

Good afternoon and welcome to my latest feature on MorganLinton.com – Domain Development Tools! Today I am very excited to share a very cool tool that has been incredibly useful in my business, and will probably help many other domain developers out there. The tool is called Balsamiq and it is honestly the quickest and easiest ways to mockup a design before sitting down to write code (or before paying someone else to sit down and write code – my favorite approach!).

Balsamiq

The image above shows a cool example of what a Balsamiq mockup might look like. Yes – you’ll notice it looks like it was drawn freehand with a pencil. Sure, you could draw this yourself, but with Balsamiq you can quickly generate any element you’d like and align it on the page.

Why I think this is such a useful tool for Domain Developers is when it comes to explaining to your team what you want to build. Since I personally don’t code the sites we build myself I constantly struggle to try to explain my vision for a site to my developers and designers. However, since I’m not much of an artist, okay – let me rephrase this, I am such a bad artist that often you can’t really even tell what I’ve drawn when I finish! Which means that I end-up accompanying my drawings with long descriptions that can easily lead to confusion. Sure, in the end it turns-out as I wanted, but it often takes multiple iterations to really explain my vision.

Balsamiq makes it super simple to throw-together an easy to understand mockup so that a code wizard can turn it into a real website.

Balsamiq_Site

Another thing I really like about Balsamiq is the team that makes it. This is an innovative startup that has a real passion for the product they are making. The software itself is rock-solid and I think you’ll find it saves you a lot of time taking your ideas, and turning them into something tangible that other people can understand.

One final note – I am not being paid to write this post nor are there any affiliate links in here. This is a real tool that I use and recommend. So if you’re ready to turn some of your crazy ideas into real websites, Balsamiq may be just the tool you’re looking for! Thanks for reading and happy developing!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton