Think of Balsamiq Mockups as Visio for the layman – it’s light, easy to use, not cluttered with unnecessary functionality, and runs on Adobe Air.  The presentation is something akin to what you might mockup on a whiteboard in the office and the end result, although a signature of the Balsamiq development team, is crisp and ideal for any document deliverable.

What I like about the tool most is that I was able to complete a mockup, which is functional for discussion purposes and doubles for architecture documentation, and it took me a fraction of the time I’d have spent in Visio – this gave me time to write this blog post.

At a price of $79, the product is a steal for the time it’ll save you.

Check out my finished page mockup:

A number of the sites listed were implemented by my current employer – Portal Solutions – who are also listed because our site is hosted in SharePoint.  A couple of the sites were managed and architected by yours truly :)

“TopSharepoint.com showcases some of the world’s best designed SharePoint based web sites from around the world. We carefully select SharePoint web sites based on their usability, design, creativity and ability to incorporate modern techniques. Anyone can submit a SharePoint web site for free and the only requirements we ask for is that your web site is built on SharePoint platform, well designed and original. So, if you developed, or found a SharePoint web site that might meet the above requirements we want to know about it! Please go ahead and submit your website to the TopSharepoint showcase gallery.”

Here’s my offspring, listed in the top 5:

http://www.topsharepoint.com/?s=conservation