When designing a website for someone else or in collaboration with others, getting feedback on your work can be a pain to organize; uploading screen shots, adding notations in photoshop, and then emailing them out to multiple people. You would think there’d be a better way.

Notable, from ZURB is a better way, and a very well thought out web app for making this process way simpler. It lets you quickly get screenshots of your sites into the app allowing those invited to easily add comments over the visual elements, as well as looking at the code out back. This review will take a look at what Notable is capable of and its supplementary iPhone app.

Get Going

To start up with Notable, you need to register an account. Sign up is very easy though and only takes a minute. Once done, its time to get those sites up and ready for critique. There’s several super easy ways to do this. Lets take a look at them:

Upload: If that site isn’t online yet, a quick way to get it up without having to worry about going live is just to upload a screenshot of it. Notable makes this as simple as it should be.

Bookmarklets: These work well in Safari and Firefox. Just drag the bookmarklet up into the bookmark bar. Then when you’re viewing the site online that you want to get feedback on, just click the bookmarklet. Notable will open a new window and take a screenshot of the site from their end for you to use.

URL: The name says it all; just paste in the url and you’ll get a nice screenshot.

Firefox Plugin: This is very cool. For those websites that require login, or those that your are just testing on your own server, will obviously not be able accessible by the computers at Notable to take a screenshot for you. So the people at Zurb have kindly made an awesome Plugin for the Firefox users amongst you. Whist viewing a page that only you have access to, simply click the ‘Notable’ button and your page will be instantly photographed and uploaded without any interruptions.

Make use of the Firefox plugin.

Give Feedback

Once you have got your site up on Notable, it’s time to get the word out there. You can do this by either inviting people to view your site via email, or simply allowing select contacts to access it.

Once that’s good to go, you can go about adding your own comments to the various elements of the site, or just sit back and wait for your respondents to get back to you. Notable sports a very intuitive feedback system, and lets you cover the four main aspects of the site; Visuals, Code, Copy, and SEO.

The interface for adding feedback on the front end visuals of the website work smoothly and well. Adding a note is as simple as dragging across an area you would like to notate, forming a box around it. You can then type a note beside the box, which when moused over, will reveal itself. It’s very easy to figure out how everything works, and there is hardly any learning curve at all which is great for getting a client to give feedback who doesn’t want to learn a whole new application.

Commenting on front end design is a cinch.


One of Notables strengths is it’s ability to let you see the code, copy, and SEO of the site. The code is colored to make it read clearly, and lets you view and comment on the HTML, javascript, and stylesheets.

And even the back end of the design can be evaluated.

Copy simply displays the physical, written text displayed on the site, and SEO reveals interesting information gathered from the code for the less web savvy, including search keywords, descriptions, and also a run down on the body content.

Notable also lets you download your notated website as a PDF file for printing or emailing to others.

iPhone, There’s an App for That Too

Also discuss iPhone optimized designs.

Zurb have made a free, complementary iPhone application which works on the iPhone and iPod Touch. It doesn’t do much, but it does allow for those who want to make their site iPhone friendly quickly upload screenshots to show how it looks on the device.

The app does require you to actually take the screenshots on the device from Mobile Safari before opening up Notable and uploading straight to your account from there. I’ve also found the app to be a little buggy, deleting my past uploads from the history upload screen. Not that it really matters much as they are still on the server.

It would be nice if the app gave you the ability to edit the pages on your account, and even add feedback, but at this stage it does none of these things. This would make sense, as the Notable web app doesn’t function so well on the iPhone due it’s dragging requirement when adding notations on the visuals.

Pricing

Notable offers a wide range of plans and prices, going from Free up to a whopping $119/month. Basically you get what you pay for, and I would say the prices are fairly reasonable for what they offer.

If you’re like me and just designing one or two sites, needing feedback from others, the Free account serves fine. This gives you plenty of storage at 3GB, but with only 3 users and 1 workspace, anyone wanting more will need to consider one of the larger plans.

Pricing is familiar to many web apps available today.

Conclusion

Overall Notable provides a great service to those who are looking for a better and easier way to get fast feedback on sites. You could even use this service for other mediums such as graphic design or images, but of course you would miss out on all the back end features like code notation.

If this web app sounds like it would be useful to you, I’d recommend giving it a go. The biggest problem might be getting your clients to sign up. Let us know what you think of it, or how you choose to get feedback on your website development.