I know MS Visio is another common go-to for this sort of thing, but the few times I’ve used it I was left feeling I should’ve just opened up Photoshop or Illustrator instead.

I checked out the Pencil add-on for Firefox too. After 25+ minutes of trying to get it to do what I wanted it to do without resorting to documentation (I feel a wireframe tool shout be at least vaguely intuitive to someone who uses Photoshop regularly), I shut it down and moved on.

Denim and Balsamiq sounded interesting, but where some people liked that they had a “sketchy” look, I wanted something with cleaner lines that would seem more professional to certain audiences.

Finally, I decided to give Mockingbird a try. And I’m so glad I did.

Mockingbird is in beta right now, and offers free accounts. They’ll probably try to monetize it sometime in the near future with a paid subscription plan. But, for now, its a zero-cost, cloud-based, easy to use platform for quickly, painlessly making a decent wireframe for Web site design. You can create a new project with multiple pages, and then export the whole thing to a zip file containing PNGs of your mock-ups.

I found Mockingbird to be, in a word, perfect. If you’re in need of something easy and convenient the next time you need to pull together a mock-up for a client, I strongly recommend this solution.

I’ve recently begun working on the home page. My first comp is to the right here.

The goals of the site redesign are:

• update the design for a more modern appearance
• improve navigation
• highlight the company’s presence on social networks
• improve search engine optimization (SEO)
• improve usability for potential clients to sign up for classes and dives

To learn more about this great new business in DC, check out their current Web site, and let me know what you think about my design thus far.

I have to say, I’m really happy with the way it turned out, and I learned a lot of new things about WordPress in the process. I love how easy it is to theme and modify! Especially compared to Drupal, which I’m still delving into at length.

Any-hoo, stop by the new Karmella’s Game site and let the band know what you think of it by leaving a comment. And check out their great music while you’re at it.

I think the best thing about this whole debacle is that just being overcapacity is causing all these mindless tweeters to issue MORE tweets about the service being overcapacity. Which is why humanity is doomed, my friends.