PowerPoint for Web Mock-Ups

I had read a tip for web designers a few months back - Adobe Illustrator is good for creating mock-ups for a web apps. Well, I got another tip for all those short-cut hungry, time-savers out there - Use PowerPoint.
We had some 5 days left for submission of Project SpaceLock's architecture for Student2Business, and I had no idea how to show to my group, how the Web Interface would look like.
Enter Microsoft PowerPoint into the scene. All I did was layout the menus and a little background, that all, everything else was taken care by PowerPoint.
Don't believe me? have a look at the Mock-Ups yourself - http://www.slideshare.net/ideamonk/space-lock-web-ui

And then compare it to the finished user interface I did today -

• http://spacelock.blogspot.com/2009/03/another-section-of-web-interface-down.html
• http://spacelock.blogspot.com/2009/03/intrusions-archive-interface.html
• http://spacelock.blogspot.com/2009/03/control-interface-finished.html
• http://spacelock.blogspot.com/2009/03/home-section-of-web-interface-is-done.html
  

Minor improvements are all that you will find. This is the first time I could complete a complete interface in just 4 hours, I usually take more that a day :O :P ;)
And guess what, mysteriously, I never had those famous nasty bugging IE6 design issues. It work's on a newly installed Windows XP too - http://spacelock.blogspot.com/2009/03/wow-that-worked-on-ie6-on-xp-too.html

The Lesson - Do look at PowerPoint too as an alternative for creating rapid prototypes and mocks for Web Interfaces.

SpaceLock : our upcoming project

Well off lately my geek friends and I are working on project Space Lock to put into Microsoft's Student2Business contest. We're focusing more on planning it right, so that development goes really smooth and we can divide our work properly. I realize that when you've people who are experts in their domain and when your project needs to combine different technologies, then teamwork really comes to life. You can easily assign electronics part to one, web interface to another and application programming part to another person and so on...
And you don't get into messy situation where two people are doing programming over the same C# project remotely or both are into writing PHP scripts... time does get wasted in such a scenario. How ? -

• you end up wasting time in resolving conflicts
• the broad picture about the project in minds of two people can differ a lot
• you really have to communicate and keep one another updated
• you sometimes need to compromise on amazing ideas you get, while it might be seen as impractical by your partner
• E.g. you might be thinking about a really cool interactive UI using silverlight or flash while your partner might be more worried about availability and accessibility

While when in a web design/development the things are really well divided, you have a designer and you have a programmer :) XHTML/CSS/AJAX on one side, PHP/MySQL/Smarty on another. Anyways, here's the logo for our project, while the planning and development goes on, you can spend some time figuring out what this project is all about :) have a look -