Web design blog

Axure, the widely used wireframing tool, issues free licenses to students and teachers:

If you are a student enrolled in a high school, university, community college, or extension/certificate program, you are qualified to receive a free educational license of Axure RP Pro.

If you are a teacher interested in using Axure RP Pro for a class, we provide an educational license for you and a second educational license for use on classroom or lab computers.

[www.axure.com/edu]

About Axure:

Axure RP Pro is a wireframing, rapid prototyping, documentation and specification software tool aimed at web and desktop applications. It offers drag and drop placement, resizing, and formatting of widgets. Axure supports prototyping Rich Internet Applications by mapping desired interface behaviors (such as displaying or hiding an element) in response to actions like mouse clicks or touch gestures. Axure RP generates HTML web sites and Microsoft Word documents as output.

[Wikipedia]

You should gather and produce content prior to starting the design, says Ben Callahan, and you should consider using a content prototype to organize the content:

A content prototype is an HTML-and-CSS-based fluid-grid prototype, consisting of layout and typography, that consists of the project’s actual content. Its greatest usefulness may be in determining where to apply media queries to make the Web design responsive.

For centuries, we have shaped our layouts and typefaces according to the meaning of the content. This has traditionally been done on fixed-width pages. We have inherited a fixed-width mentality in designing for the Web, when in fact the Web is not fixed-width. Users come to our websites for content. We should strive to present this content in the most appropriate and readable way possible.

— Ben Callahan @ Smashing Magazine