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In the last couple of weeks I've been very quiet in my blog.
Outside my blog a lot is going on. I'm getting engaged in new projects, participating to IBM events around WebSphere Portal and of course preparing to unveil the experimental lab I begun to build on Amazon EC2 some week ago.
While preparing the new portal I faced a problem... Out of the box the themes provided by IBM with WebSphere Portal are "fair" but not good enough to have people (read customers) say "WOW I want that".
Over time IBM polished up the product and created some "not so bad" themes but today people tend to chose a product also for it's look, not just for the functionality. This means that if we want to "win" we've to show customers a good design that's functional and very pleasant to the user's eyes.
Since I'm not a designer and I wanted something "fast" I looked up in the internet and found a number of great resources you can use when you feel the need for something that's both nice to see and ready to use.
I found these sites, take a look and start improving your web application/blogs/sites experience for users:
- Open Source Web Design (http://www.oswd.org/)
- Open Web Design (http://www.openwebdesign.org/)
- Open Design Community (http://www.opendesigns.org/)
- Free Layouts (http://www.freelayouts.com/)
Just by browsing here you'll find a number of high quality designs that you can take and use for personal or commercial use.
After browsing two or three hundreds of themes I actually selected the Indigo theme for my next work (maybe I'll update my blog too)
I'll be soon implementing it on WebSphere Portal and prepare for the next step.
Finally I also bought Balsamiq Mockups, a great tool I learned about trough Chris Sparshoot's blog. It costs 75 $ but it pays itself in a few days if designing applications/websites is part of your work.
Here are the first studies for the UI of the new Portal:
Finally since I'm also working on an iGoogle like theme for WebSphere portal I also designed a mockup for it using the same tool. It's amazing how "visualizing" things improves the design work. (I first learned about this at Chris Blatnik sessions, but doing it for real is another story)
And here's the iGoggle UI expressed as a mockup:
Comments (2)
Daniele Vistalli March 8th, 2009 18:29:13