What are wireframes?
Think of wireframes as a blueprint for your website. You would never start building a skyscraper without an architect’s drawings, so why should you start building your website before creating wireframes?
Wireframes are simple black and white layouts which consist of the different building blocks your website will be made from. If you don’t understand jargon such as ‘hero slider’ or ‘call to action’, going through your wireframes with your designer will teach you about all the different ways of presenting content on your website. Wireframing is an effective way to design a website at a structural level, therefore they are used early in the website build process to establish the basic structure of the page before the visual design and content are added.
When you are presented with breath-taking website designs, it is easy to get distracted and forget about the user experience. Wireframes work to push usability to the forefront of the discussion. Styling, colours and graphics are kept to a minimum, which forces everyone to look objectively at the ease of use, conversion paths, navigation links and feature placement.
Typically, your designer will create different wireframes for different page templates on your website. For example, you might have one template for the homepage, one for the contact page and one for your product page (where the same template gets used for every single product). This is why wireframes don’t contain any content, as it is all variable.
Why use wireframes?
The same screen can be built in a lot of different ways, but only a few of them will get your message across clearly and result in an easy-to-use website. Nailing down a good user experience is possibly the most important part of designing a website. Wireframing effectively allows you to give your site a test run. You can see how easy it is to find pages, how clear your menus are, how intuitive the navigation is and so much more!
Instead of trying to combine functionality and creativity in one step, wireframes ensure that these elements are taken one at a time. This allows clients to provide feedback earlier in the process. Skipping out on wireframes will delay this feedback and increase the costs of making changes because full design mock-ups must be entirely reworked, whilst wireframes can be simply amended.
Without wireframes, you would be designing your website based on trial and error. Your project would end up taking even longer, because you will find errors and mistakes after development has taken place. As a result, you would need to go back to designing again, before passing it back to the developer to code for a second time. This will go on and on as you work your way through amendments.
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If you would like to discuss your website design requirements, please get in touch. We are an Oxfordshire based web design & build agency, working with clients all over the country to deliver high-impact website design services along with a wireframe design phase. Please email info@xist2.com or call 01993 835117. We would be happy to discuss your needs.
