Tag Archives for Creately

For the past 20 years, I’ve been helping entrepreneurs and business owners write business plans. In doing so, I’ve learned that the perfect business plan must be both functional and easy to read.

With regards to functional, a business plan should provide a clear roadmap of how you’re going to grow your company. And with regards to “easy to read,” your plan can’t include pages and pages of text sure to make readers cringe. Creately online roadmap maker allows you to build comprehensive roadmaps. You can also use business plan software like Upmetrics to simplify the process and organize your full plan with clarity and structure.

Rather, you want people to enjoy reading your plan, so they take the action you desire such as funding your business.

Fortunately, when adding Creately to your business plan, you can make your plan both more functional and easier to read.

To confirm this, I used my core business plan template and brainstormed the best places to add Creately diagrams to improve your business plan. Below are five areas I found where Creately can provide significant value.

Company Overview

In the Company Overview section of your business plan, you want to detail what your company has already accomplished to date. This is because past accomplishments are a great indicator of future success.

A Creately chart, like the one below, is a great way to show these accomplishments.

Industry Analysis

It’s very important for readers to understand the size of your marketplace.

And oftentimes your business may compete in more than one market. Using a Venn Diagram Maker within Creately is a great way to quickly explain to readers the markets you’re targeting and their sizes.

A great visualization technique to illustrate your company’s position within the industry is a SWOT analysis.

A SWOT analysis illustrates the strengths and weaknesses that exist within the internal environment of the company and opportunities and threats that exist within the external environment of the organization.

It can help you effectively present the current position and the circumstances of your company within the industry to the reader. Creately has many professionally designed SWOT analysis templates so you can get started instantly.

Key Operational Processes

Your business plan should detail the key day-to-day processes that your company performs to generate sales and profits.

Having a Creately flowchart, like the one below, allows you to easily document your processes and show them to others.

Risk Mitigating Milestones

A “risk mitigating milestone” is a milestone that, once completed, reduces the risk your venture will fail. As such, investors and lenders need to understand your milestones and how they relate to one another.

The Creately Gantt chart maker below allows the reader to quickly and easily see your company’s milestones. You can even add in times when additional funding might be required.

Management Team

Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Great management teams are not.

The fact is that the quality of your management team is crucial to your company’s success. In your business plan, you should detail who is on your team and your reporting structure.

Also, if you need to hire a key person to improve your team, you should include the title and responsibilities of that person in your plan.

A great way to show your management team in your plan is via a Creately Organization Chart software as shown below:

In summary, making your business plan both functional and easy to read will dramatically improve its success, and Creately is a great tool to achieve this most easily.

Author Bio

Dave Lavinsky is a serial entrepreneur and the president and founder of Growthink, which since 1999, has helped hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs create business plans.  Dave is also the founder of BusinessPlanTemplate.com which provides templates for specific niches ranging from restaurants to internet businesses.

Remember, earlier this June we launched our New Creately Viewer? In case you missed the news, let us give you a quick recap of what it is.

The Creately Viewer a handy little widget that lets you embed your diagrams on your web pages or blogs. It may appear like any other static image, but once you hover over it you get a plethora of options on a toolbar that lets you view and explore the diagram in its full glory.

Over the last couple of months, we’ve been working on making this even better.

And the latest thing to land on this is an awesome set of linking features that enable you to navigate through links on your Creately diagrams super smoothly.

A Mini Diagram Browser Inside Your Web Page!

Go on, hover over the diagrams below. You’ll see what we mean! 

A Link button will appear on the Viewer’s toolbar if there are any links on your Creately diagram, and when you hover over the shape that is linked, it will be highlighted.

Hovering over the link button, you can access the link menu containing the thumbnail preview and the title of each link.

If a shape is linked to another Creately diagram it will open in the Viewer itself, and if it is linked to an outside source, it will direct you to a new tab on the browser.

And the handy back/ forward button on the toolbar lets you navigate from one linked diagram to the other seamlessly.

If that is not taking viewing diagrams to the next level, we don’t know what is! 😉  

Here are some tips on how to make the most of the new Creately viewer in your day to day usage.

Linked Wireframes for Easy Prototyping

Bring your mockups to life by linking the right buttons and links to other pages or views on your Web and Mobile app wireframes.

Simplify Complex Processes by Breaking down Your Flowcharts

Some flowcharts are too big to digest in one go. A neat trick is to break them down into smaller sub-flows and link them via a primary flow.

Link to Outside Sources on Your Mind Map to Create Knowledge Banks

Links work with other web pages as well. Works great on all kinds of diagrams and especially mind maps!

Connect Your Central Organizational Chart to Departmental Org Charts

If you are a bigger organization, this is a no-brainer. Make org charts for each team/department and link them up. Embed the Auto-Updating diagram inside your intranet (with a secure link) and you’ve got an easily navigable org chart!

Stay Tuned! Big Things are On their way!

The Creately team is in Full-On development mode and we are hard at work on our new HTML5 app (along with a few other things).

We are halfway there and a lot more exciting new things are yet to come before the end of this year.

Stay tuned for the next big thing. It is going to be goooooood!

We are excited to announce the New Creately Viewer – that’s right, all new and improved – is now live.  

Over the last months we worked on rebuilding the Creately Viewer from the ground up. It’s based on a newer tech stack that has allowed us to make sure that you get the best end of the deal; in this case an awesome diagram viewing experience!

It’s packed with a plethora of handy options that makes viewing diagrams an absolute pleasure!

But First, What Exactly is the Creately Viewer?

The Creately Viewer is fundamentally designed as a part of the app, but at the same time it is a portable interactive diagram viewer that can be used to embed diagrams in private or public web pages.  

Let us put it this way – take YouTube for an example: while you use the platform to watch videos online, you have the ability to export videos you like and embed them on your web pages. The Creately Viewer is very similar to this, except you use it to view or publish your diagrams on websites, blogs, presentations, Google Sites etc.  

View Diagrams the Way You are Supposed to!

Sometimes viewing large diagrams on a page can be a pain. Yes, we know! That’s the reason why we came up with the Creately Diagram Viewer in the first place; just to make sure that our users are able to view or read diagrams of any size and avoid turning it into a headache.

On the older version of the Viewer, images were loaded as rasters (PNG) and – to be honest – it didn’t offer the best user experience. But on the new and improved Creately Diagram Viewer, diagrams will be loaded as vectors (SVG). This means two things;

1.       Your diagrams will be sharp as a ray of sunshine on any screen (both mobile and desktop)  
2.       Your diagrams will be undistorted at any zoom level (literally at- ANY- zoom- level!)

Could viewing diagrams get any better?!

Publish Your Diagrams in Style!

It’s not easy to fit a large diagram that fills up an entire canvas into one web page – well, not without reducing its size until it’s no longer of decent quality. Likewise, with those small diagrams that need to be stretched out until they are blurred or washed out.

But listen to this! Publish your diagrams on the Creately Viewer, and you will never have to worry about cropping out or resizing your diagrams until they are unreadable to your audience again.                                                                       

On your web page, the Viewer may appear like an ordinary image but hover over it, you find an entire toolbar of options to play around with the image. The zoom and pan features of the diagram viewer are directly integrated into the scroll and drag features of your mouse. On touch screens, you can zoom in and out on your diagrams with a simple pinch or a double tap.   

All you need to publish your diagram is an embed code. To get it, simply access the diagram’s properties panel on the editor and tap on the Publish tab; here you get a list of options to embed your diagram. Along with the embed code, you are given access to settings to adjust the background color, height and width of the Player.    

Diagram Happily Ever After!

Unlike an image which will remain the same over time, the Creately Diagram Viewer will always adjust itself automatically.

What does this mean, you ask? Well, as you know some diagrams don’t stay the same over time; they need updating. And when they do, you need to make sure that the diagrams that are already published are renewed according to the changes made. This is essential to prevent those who view your diagram from getting dated or wrong information.  

Doing this manually is a literal nightmare!

This is where the Creately Diagram Viewer comes in handy. The Diagram Viewer always fetches the updated version of the diagram making sure that the original Creately diagram and the published version are synced. Regardless of whatever change you make and whenever you do it, your readers will always get access to the latest version of your diagrams when they are published via the Creately Diagram Viewer.

There’s More to Come!

Over the next few weeks we’ll be releasing the rest of the Creately Player’s features that make it even more special. Watch out for an update from us really soon!

But that’s not all! We are also working on another set of special features that allow users to integrate the Viewer into platforms such as WordPress and Google Docs. This means you can expect a cool Creately Diagram Viewer plugin to use with all your favorite document management apps.

We’ve been working super hard on changing our tech stack and on innovating on the core drawing experience of Creately. Creately Mobile & Creately Diagram Viewer is just the beginning of this massive transformation Creately is going through. A lot of new exciting things are on their way.

We will keep you posted!

Late last year, when we released the Creately mobile app, we had one goal in mind; to expand Creately’s powerful collaboration features a step further. To be exact, we wanted to enable our users to be able to easily view and collaborate on their diagrams, no matter where they are.

The Creately mobile app, in fact, has helped us create a seamless diagramming experience for you, regardless of time or place.

It’s Simple, but It has a Massive Cherry on Top!

Like any other mobile app, Creately mobile is built for both Android and iOS and fits perfectly across all mobile phone screen sizes. And it’s Free for all users! Plus all its features are specifically designed to allow users to review and collaborate on their diagrams in any situation.

But hey, here’s why you will wholeheartedly appreciate having the app on your phone

Keep Yourself Updated at All Times

You get to browse and view any diagram, public or private, anytime – on the commute, by the water cooler, on board a plane or on vacation when you decide to ditch your laptop at home on purpose.

You are supposed to review the latest diagram your team is working on or confirm that they are on the right track even without your constant supervision or help? With the mobile app, you can quickly view your diagrams in perfect detail, including any comments left by the team, and make sure that everything’s going according to plan back home!

Get Stuff Done Together (Even Though You are Really Not There!)

Imagine this; you are about to meet with and present to your client a diagram of the product you are developing, and your team informs you that those few issues you had pointed out before you left the office, have been fixed.

Sitting in the lobby outside your client’s office, you feel the need to quickly verify that the diagram is correctly done and is presentation-ready. You can use the Creately mobile app then and there to quickly review the changes and revise your talking points.

In another situation, say, your team is waiting for your immediate feedback, but you are on the way to somewhere else; all you have to do is open up your Creately mobile app, tap on the diagram and leave your comments with instructions. You can even comment on specific shapes by simply tapping on them. As your team works through the changes, you can see and review them as they happen.

And sharing with the mobile app cannot get any easier; you can simply share the diagram with someone from within the app by giving the email of the person or you can get the link to the diagram and send it to someone using any of your messaging apps.

From One Diagram to Another with a Simple Tap

The Creately mobile app creates a real interactive experience in viewing in-line links. You can navigate smoothly through interlinked UI mockups, wireframes, sitemaps, context diagrams etc. through the mobile app. Linked shapes or areas of the diagram are highlighted with a small indicator by clicking which, you can easily get to the next diagram right from inside the app. You can navigate through all the linked diagrams within that same screen.

The Mobile App is an Important Milestone. But There’s More!

Remember when we announced our New Beginning early this year? The mobile app is a significant part of this much bigger effort in reinventing Creately in a monumental way. As we continue to build on it, you can expect an array of new features and capabilities that will make your diagramming experience with Creately something that you truly crave for.

The year 2016 has been a great year for Creately. We made significant progress on all fronts in taking Creately to new heights. Our team has actively produced high-value content and material to help you create better diagrams with Creately. We have expanded our reach and now cater to a much larger user base. We have also been sending you important product updates on all of our Creately flavors. However as some of you may have taken note, last year we did not release any major upgrades to any of the Creately products. So we thought it’s time we brought you in on the scoop of what’s been happening.

The year 2016 has been one of the biggest years for the Creately team. Mostly because it has been about not just building new features or maintaining products, but taking a step back to really look at what is the next big thing for diagramming. During early 2016 we did just that, which brought us to two important decisions.

First Decision: Changing the Tech Stack

We started building the first version of Creately in 2008 and a lot has changed in the tech world since then. While we did many new things on the way, using existing tech stacks, our foundation has always been the same. Our back-end and the Creately client app were stuck to the same building blocks that they started off on. Though the Creately apps work really well and deliver a great experience, we have had limitations in what we want to do due to the tech stack and architecture we are on right now. Some of you have had concerns about our dependency on Adobe Flash and that’s something we have wanted to change for a while too. So we decided that it was time to rip everything out and start again 🙂

Second Decision:  A new way to draw, innovating on the core drawing experience

Day in and day out the team at Creately is focused only on one thing – and that is building the best diagramming experience in the world! We have come a long way since we started and we are proud of what we have achieved. Yet we always feel there is more that can be done. We always arrive at the very simple notion that “no-one really likes to draw”. The essence of diagramming is to present complex or not-so-easy-to-understand information in a simpler, understandable, visual way. What if someone can avoid the drawing process and simply provide the information through an interactive experience, which turns the information into a great looking diagram? We are determined and we believe we will disrupt the way people draw diagrams, once again.

Based on this new direction we worked on the following during 2016.

A Much Efficient Team

We have a great team at Creately, smart, energetic and focused. However, as it goes with anything, there is always room to improve. To achieve our goals we knew there is hard work ahead and we wanted to make every minute of our time well spent. So we started perfecting our way of working. We formed an effective process and started automating everything that we should not be spending time on. We set a goal to deliver every day. Right now all our applications deliver every 3 hours to our staging servers. Our web applications deliver to production every week. Our process is set up with multiple assertive measures such as 100% covered unit tests, mandatory reviews, automated integration/end-to-end testing in multiple environments to ensure delivery of the best of quality.

Completely Rethought Architecture

We started rebuilding our back-end applications and our front-end applications on a whole new architecture and tech-stack to support continuous functional scaling. The Java based back-end application can function on any communication protocol but Creately applications will work on websockets to make the apps more responsive and fast. Building in new capability into the back-end is extremely simple due to the modular architecture that allows plugging in capability on the fly. This also allows scaling very easily. All front-end apps are built on HTML5, written in TypeScript, using the new Angular 2 framework. All client app capabilities are bundled into a common library, which enables us to build different flavors of Creately apps very easily, reusing most of our previous work.

New Creately Apps

All distributions of Creately applications will be rebuilt on the new architecture. The first of these applications is the Creately Mobile App which was released on the App Store and Google Play Store during December 2016. With the mobile app, we have done most of the groundwork, which can be reused to build other Creately apps such as the Creately Editor, Creately Viewer, Creately Desktop, the embeddable Creately Player and Creately plugins for JIRA/Confluence and so on. All of these apps will have a clean re-thought interface and will work together flawlessly.

2017 is going to be a monumental year for us and for all of you who have been with us. We are hard at work and want to bring you all the new exciting goodies as fast as we can! So stay tuned and do let us know your thoughts on all of this.

Drawing beautiful diagrams just got easier

Beautiful. Bold. Intelligent.

That’s how we like our diagrams. The idea is to take all that complex data and lay it out in a way that not only makes sense, but is also pleasing to the eye.

Unfortunately, that’s not always easy: all too often we find ourselves looking at ugly, haphazardly designed diagrams that took far too long to put together.

Creately’s latest update makes everything better

Our mission is simple: to make sure that you get the best diagramming experience possible. To allow you to effortlessly draw and layout your data and diagrams.

And to that end, we’ve been working on improving what we already have: we’ve come up with a new version of Creately, bringing with it some radical improvements over the previous.

100’s of new shapes to create even better diagrams

Over 1000 meticulously crafted shapes, ready for you to choose from and combine into any type of diagram you have in mind. New shape libraries. Powerful overhauls to existing libraries to give you a whole new level of flexibility. All of this set in our overhauled user interface to give you effortless drag-and-drop diagramming power.

We’ve studied the science of how beautiful, meaningful diagrams work so that we can give you exactly what you need. This new update will reach everyone who uses our product and everything you use it for.

Of course, more isn’t everything

We’ve upgraded how the little things work – connectors, glue points, how they link to objects, how they move around – and at each point we’ve selected colors with great care, so as to give to maximum visual coherence without creating clutter.

Colors matched for you

The idea is to ensure that every diagram you make has a consistent mix of colors, so you don’t have to waste time yourself on these little details. Every pixel, every connector, every shape has been drawn, redrawn and obsessed over to make Creately a whole new standard in diagram creation.

Faster, slicker mind maps

Our obsession has paid off – we’ve now got the most effortless diagramming experience out there. Now anyone can put together even the most complex diagrams in a fraction of the time – from Gantt charts to networks maps, from data flow diagrams to mind maps. Everything’s right at your fingertips. 

Stay tuned for updates; we’ll be exploring all of these changes in detail across our blog and social media so you know just how much power you now have. If you have any questions, remember: all you have to do is ask. We’re here to help. 

Because after all, we’re not just making software: we’re making an experience.

What would you like to see next?