What is Wireframe? Why Wireframes Are Important in the Web Design?

In today’s market, website design or UI, UX design is a very attractive career option for many creative people. When a web designer starts a website or app design, they follow a few steps from start to end for building final product output. Wireframe design is the very first or second step to follow by a designer. In other words, building a website or app of any size or shape, wireframes are the foundation on which the whole project stands on. It shows how the final product will look like before investing in huge manpower and money.

What is a wireframe?

A website wireframe is a visual prototype that represents the skeletal of a final website output. Suppose your client wants to create a brand new website for an eCommerce store. But he or she is very much confused about website layout, functionality, how the website will interact with the customer, where the menu, cart icon, the search bar will be placed etc. In that case, you must create a wireframe to properly visualize his vision and ideas.

Wireframes can be pen/pencil drawings or sketches on a paper/whiteboard. The creation of the website wireframe represents the beginning of the design phase. Wireframes help to establish the functionality and the relationships between different screen templates of a website. An iterative process, creating wireframes is an effective way to make rapid prototypes of pages, while measuring the practicality of a design concept.

For cutting project costs, many website designers skip the wireframe design step and start from coding or layout design/PSD design. This is a very bad habit, for most of the case they do changes in PSD design or coding file multiple times to match with client ideas. This delays the project complete time. Below is the example of a wireframe design:

Few characters of Wireframe

1) It is a black & white blueprint of any website from where we get an idea of the final product before putting any extra effort. It helps to better understand website flowchart.

2) A wireframe does not include colors, fonts, logo or specific images, etc. But from a wireframe, we can easily understand in which section our logo will be placed, which section our call to action element will go etc.

3) A non-technical person can also make wireframe in a notebook. This hand made wireframe, helps the web designer to better understand client thought.

4) As there are multiple people involved in the creation of a website, wireframes ensure that everybody working on the site are on the same page.

Wireframe software

As we all know the wireframe can be drawn by a pen/pencil on a notebook. But to demonstrate the client, most of the web design uses below software ( online or offline) to create a wireframe for better look and presentation. They are:

Wireframe.cc link https://wireframe.cc/

Adobe Xd Wireframe Kit https://www.adobe.com/products/xd/ui-design-kits.html

Balsamiq https://balsamiq.com/

Pidoco https://pidoco.com/en

InDesign Adobe https://www.adobe.com/in/products/indesign.html

Photoshop https://www.adobe.com/in/products/photoshop.html

Why Wireframes Are Important in Web Design?

Though in my above write up I already discuss a few important points why we should start to do wireframe before our layout design starts. In this section, I will discuss more advantages of wireframe creation.

Understand client ideas in a better way Wireframes help a web designer to understand what clients want actually. When you are working with a few clients and show them your wireframe designs, paying close attention to their feedback will help you to read their mind. In the future when you build the final mockup, your work will be easier and faster. Because you know the client’s test. Wireframes Enhance Usability When using Wireframes to implement the layout of a website, the focus is only on the usability of the website. The client can clearly see how the end-user will see our website page using a wireframe look. If something went wrong we can easily rectify that to make the end product better. Changing any part of the wireframe is much easier and less expensive than changing them during a testing phase after the site has been developed. Content Creation Ideas From wireframe layout design, we can determine which section needs images, content and how long our content will be. So a website owner can create beautiful images and section-wise content. It saves time for launching the project and no dummy content for the site visitor. Most importantly the first impression will be very good for visitors. Wireframes Save Overall Time on Project development Wireframing saves time in a number of ways. If you start your project design from the wireframe, you can quickly create the whole project mockup. Your team member will understand what they will do and plan their tasks accordingly. If you want to import more features in the future, you can easily do that with proper planning. Everyone from the web team, the agency and client are all on the same page about what the website is supposed to do and how it is supposed to function. Help the client to understand application features The most important task of wireframes is to determine what features we want to implement on our website. Suppose the client wants a popup or social logins like facebook, google signup or google map implementation on the website. So he can include those in the wireframe and see how it goes with the site. Wireframes can help in clarification and make this process extremely easy since they show it all in a visual manner.