The Interactive Ideas Blog

The path to innovation is not always straightforward. There are unforeseen twists and turns along the way that can take you somewhere you hadn’t initially imagined. For example, take Site9. We started out in 1999 as a web services firm, and we built plenty of successful dynamic, complex websites.  A few years back, we had the bright idea of taking our internal site building software to the masses. We felt so strongly about our tool that we moved away from services and became a full-on software company.

In 2006, we debuted Launch Platform, our first release. Our design-to-deployment web development software proved popular with users, but we would hear again and again from clients how much they really liked the website prototyping portion of Launch. They shared with us how the initial step of prototyping got their entire team involved early on, which was a challenge with paper wireframes. They told us how their website developers were able to avoid many of the pitfalls that often arise due to poor planning, because the clickable prototype allowed for a clearer understanding of the project’s scope and requirements. And the prototypes weren’t a dead end – they became building blocks for the next phase of development.

We were somewhat bemused because we were so proud of some of the more involved and complicated parts of Launch; we hadn’t given the prototyping step that much attention. We stepped back for a moment, took a closer look at it, and realized that these folks were right – this prototyping thing, with a little work, would be a very exciting and useful web development tool.

Last summer we did some serious market research to find an existing, good website prototyping and collaboration tool. We couldn’t find one. Combined with the advice and suggestions of our clients, we decided to flesh out an interactive prototyping tool that would be accessed through a browser and offered as a service. And then to really take the next big step forward we had to find a way for our clients to share their prototypes in a collaborative wiki-format. And then the integrated collaboration part of the tool suddenly became obvious to us – and we all got very excited about the possibilities. And that’s how we got to ProtoShare™. And you better believe we have some new ideas for tomorrow.

Tags: collaborative web development, protoshare, site9, website prototyping

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 and is filed under Product / Release Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.