[Sigia-l] Sitemapping and Macs

[Pradyot Rai]

> After having recently switched to Mac OS X, I am interested in a
> sitemapping program that will work on this platform.  Previously, I have
> only used Visio on the PC.
>
> Anyone have any suggestions?

Besides all those good tools already suggested -- Illustrator, Freehand,
OmniGraph; there are some recomendation for Adobe InDesign,
Pagemaker/QuarkXpress kind of applications. If you are in a business of
documenting via wireframes, lot of people (in the team) may eventually
want to put their hands on the wireframes. I have seen that Business
Analysts, Programmers, Designers/IAs, Project managers all try to touch
the wireframes where it plays the central role for building the product.
In all those instances it is recomended to keep yourself away from falling
for VISIO (you may not know what trouble may lie ahead).

One of the common mistakes companies do at this early stage is to start
with VISIO... It then becomes defacto standard tool for the whole
enterprise and in the spirit to accomplish the task as a team, everyone
burns themself learning this non-sensical tool. Although, I am not the
guru in InDesign but I can tell you, after slogging for more than 2 years
with VISIO, I am sure all that I want to do now (and what my team wants)
can very easily/logically can be accomplised by tools such as PageMaker.
On top of it, the amount of time we have spend learning (as a team) VISIO,
will be far less for any tool mentioned here.

Some of the points with PageMaker/InDesign/Quark is that they are not very
good for the purpose of site-mapping. Initially there will be efforts
needed to create libraries of your own, too. But once standards are in
place, it is excellent tool for letting everybody use and controlling
versions and updates.

If you are about to buy-in for VISIO. Stop there, and think million times.
In all the privious discussions we had here, on this forum, nobody
disaggreed that VISIO is a difficult tool.

Pradyot Rai

"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get
its pants on." - Winston Churchill