Table of contents:

• What exactly is a website’s wireframe?
• Why should your web designers create a website wireframe?
• Are wireframes needed for every single website designed by web designers?
• How to create a simple wireframe
• Wireframe examples

Introduction

You might be about to launch a brand-new business?

Therefore, you may have contacted various web designers to explain how you want your website to be designed.
The various web design companies might all say that creating a wireframe for your new website is crucial.
Yet now you might be wondering, well, what is a wireframe?

What is its purpose?

How can it help me obtain a brilliant and well-designed website for my business?
Strap yourself in and get comfortable, because this comprehensive article will tell you everything you need to know about wireframes and why they are needed during the web design process.
Create a picture: someone designing wireframes on a tablet.

Think of wireframes like a set of architects’ plans

When you’re getting a relatively simple extension added to your house, a builder doesn’t just rock up with his van and start laying bricks willy-nilly.

There will be a set of architectural plans in place that the construction firm should follow. This is the same when designing a website; however instead of architectural drawings, you have wireframes that web designers construct to later design say a Drupal, Joomla or WordPress website. This allows an outline to be sketched based on the website’s appearance.

Wireframes therefore allow:

– Rough sketch of a website to be created
– Directors and stakeholders to have input on changes / improvements they want made before finished design goes live
– Using high fidelity wireframes gives you a good idea of what the website looks like, before it goes live

User experience (U.X) and putting the customer first

Just as when you’re designing the interior layout of the new shop, you will have a lot of people giving their input into how the design should look. For example, how the lightening should work, what flooring to use, which colour you should be painting the walls.
This is the same as with a new company website; there will often be many stakeholders, company directors, marketing managers, and senior employees which will all have input into how the website should look. For example:

– Which hex codes / colour schemes should you use?
– Which CMS should you use
– What should the footer look like?
– How the home page look?
– Which website hosting company are you going to use?
– How should the layout of the main pages look?

 
These are all questions that businesses often have, and these are the conversations that web design agencies, have with their clients often on a daily basis.

For example conversations are often had to discuss the website’s typography, colour scheme that’s going be used, and page layout for example, as these are all important considerations that will need to be thought about when designing a brand new company website.

Now, if you’re going to hire a web developer, they may decide to dive in headfirst and start designing the website without using wireframes.
What often happens is that many, if not even hundreds, of changes need to be made if the client is not happy with the finished design.

Therefore, it is a good idea to get a rough sketch and create a wireframe, whether “high-fidelity” or a “low-fidelity” wireframe created.

Don’t worry if you don’t know what high-fidelity and low-fidelity wireframes mean; we will explain more about this later on in the article.

High-fidelity wireframes are detailed and closely resemble the final website, while low-fidelity wireframes are more straightforward and focus on the basic structure and layout.

So, what exactly is a website wireframe?

The website wireframe is simply like a rough sketch of your website.

It allows you to plan what functionality your website needs, such as where the contact us boxes, buttons and CTA’S should go.
It also allows web designers / web developers to place where the pictures on your company website should go, and where the text should go where the buttons should go.

As we shall explain later in this article, when creating wireframes you don’t need expensive computer software to design them. It’s not uncommon for a business, for example when designing a simple brochure website, for the client to rock up at the web designers offices with a piece of graph paper laying out how they want the website designed.

Create a picture: Someone designing wireframe for a website on pen and paper.

Can you skip designing wireframes to say money and time?

You can skip the wireframe stage, which can bring down the cost of designing that website.
However, to do this, the web designer and the client must be on the same page. You might be scratching your head, thinking, “Well, what does that mean?”

This means that the web design team and the client need a very clear idea of how the website will look.

Therefore, they need to agree on, for example, the page layout, the typography, the logo, and the colour scheme they used.
And what we would encourage, at a minimum, is a very basic mockup. A low-fidelity mockup is created at a minimum using wireframes.

The reason for this is that on the day of the website’s grand unveiling, let’s say you’re asked to visit the web design agency’s offices to see the finished design.

You might be anxious about the website’s appearance because it’s been months in the construction stage.

The risk of not having wireframes created is that during the website’s grand unveiling, you might look disappointed.

That’s because the web designer thought you wanted the website designed that way, but it might be different from what you had envisaged.

Therefore, the website might look overly basic and a bit naff.

So what wireframes actually do is allow a very concrete idea of how the website is going to look.

Because a high-fidelity wireframe actually sets out everything from web buttons to the main menu, the picture layout, the text layout, you can gain a very good understanding of how the website is going to look before it even gets finished.

So, in more instances, can you skip designing a wireframe?

You might find some web design companies that absolutely insist that a wireframe is needed no matter what type of website is designed.
However, in some instances, we think this is overkill, and it actually costs the client an unnecessary amount of money.

As we know by now, a wireframe is simply a blueprint, a rough sketch of how the website will look.
This is all well and good- but let’s say that your web design company charges a minimum of £2000 to design wireframes for the website’s desktop and mobile versions of the website, which sounds reasonable if its say a 25-page website.

Let’s say that you need a basic one-page website to set up an event.
Its lets say a rock festival event is about to take place. You need a one-page website that links you to a ticket management company that handles ticket sales for you.

This sounds like a relatively simple website, so do you need a wireframe constructed?

In this instance, we would say that if the client and the web developers are same page regarding what is needed from the design, and sometimes, then sometimes you can actually skip the wireframe stage. For instance, a wireframe may be unnecessary if you’re creating a simple one-page website for an event or if the design requirements are straightforward and well-understood.

This can save about weeks’ worth of work in some instances or even more if it’s a large e-commerce site. These potential time and cost savings can be a relief, especially for businesses with tight schedules and budgets.
So how do you begin designing wireframes?

First, you have to think of the goal you want to obtain.

Let’s say it’s garden fencing business, just as an example.

How can you design the best website to bring as many visitors from Google as possible so you can sell more fencing?
So this adds another element to the web design process because what can happen with web designers is that they have a tunnel vision of just making the website look good and impressive, which is, of course, important.

When you think about your customers, you start to think about their questions they often have and how you can bring as more through shoppers to your website as possible.

Then, you stop thinking about things like an FAQ page and add content marketing and detailed product descriptions, which changes the web design because your website becomes much more helpful to your customers, which often means more text, more infographics, more helpful

YouTube videos, explaining the benefits of owning that product or service.

How many pages need to be designed?

Different wireframes need to be designed for each page. In some instances, this might be the case; the main service pages share the same wireframe construction because you want the same layout duplicated across say 7 main service pages. This can save time and often reduce the cost of getting a website designed.

Mobile phones

Don’t forget that it is crucial to get wireframes designed for both the mobile and desktop versions of your company website.
A different wireframe construction must be created for the mobile version because it’s an entirely different and separate design from desktop wireframes.

Your mobile version of your website, needs to be designed to be responsive, you will want it to work brilliantly on a mobile device, and arguably, we would say that you need to pay particular attention to the mobile design.

The reason for this is that the number of people buying goods and services on their mobile phones is on an upward trajectory. Therefore, web designers need to spend a lot of time designing both sets of wireframes, the desktop and mobile.

The other reason we say to pay particular attention to the mobile version when designing the wireframes for the mobile version of your website is that you need to make mobile version very simple to use.

We’ve all been there: when looking to buy goods or services, we encounter a mobile website that is just tricky and difficult to use.

The mobile menu might not function smoothly, and if it’s a burger menu and the icons are designed to be too small, you might even struggle to locate them by squinting at the screen, trying to find where the main menu expands to.

So, your web designers must design a “good user experience”.

You’re likely to hear your web designers bang on about until they are blue in the face: improving the UX of the website.

That is the user experience of a website.

You might want to go low-tech and use good old-fashioned pen and paper
So when we think of web design offices, we think of multiple staff, cutting edge computers and many people sitting around drinking fancy coffee’s.

However, if the customer has a rough sketch of how they want their website designed, say just designed on a piece of paper this can massively help the web design process.

From pen and paper, low fidelity and then a high-fidelity wireframes can be created later.

So some businesses, often small businesses, might think, well, I can’t take in scraps of paper with a rough sketch of how you want your website to be designed, to the web designers, but you can.

Many web design agencies like this because it can quickly convey how was let’s a brochure website designed.
So why not create a rough sketch at a web design company’s office, even on pen and paper or perhaps on a whiteboard?

Low fidelity wireframes

Asking your web designers to create low-fidelity wireframes can be extremely useful. It allows stakeholders, such as employees, directors, the marketing team, and even friends, to have a lot of input on how they want the website designed.

And what often happens is someone comes up with a really good point, such as, “What about this service, can we add that page?”
Therefore, this can be a precious experience in gaining feedback from your employees or friends on how to improve the design.

Content marketing
Content marketing is what petrol is to a car. If your website has no well-written, helpful text, the SEO will not go that far, if anywhere.
So, content marketing, which is just a rather fancy way of saying text needs to be applied to your website, but that text needs to be well written.

However, wireframes allow you to visualise how the text should be laid out. You need quite a bit of text added to each page, but you don’t want so much text added that it overwhelms the shopper. They don’t want to read that much text, and they leave your website causing the bounce rate to soar.

Why do we need to keep bounce rates low?

If you get the design wrong, then this means bounce rate can be very high, meaning shoppers are leaving more or less straightaway.
It is a bit like a lot of people stepping inside your restaurant, asking to see the menu, and walking straight out the door. The chef or the company director may wonder what is wrong. Why are so many people doing this?

Well this be the same for your website, if of the bounce rate through the roof, is there a reason for this because of the design or because it offering a bad user experience?

So, for example, if you apply too much text to a page, the shopper might think they are not reading all of that, its simply too much text, and they leave the website. They turn on their heels and leave straight away.

Buttons and links

You need to use calls to action throughout the website, which web designers call “CTAs”.

You want to offer valuable information the customer finds useful when deciding whether to buy a product or service.
Then follow that up with a CTA, which might be a button that simply says contact us

The CTA is, therefore, simply a prompt: Do you require further help?
Yet without this, we might lose the customer; they might have gone off the website and onto a competitor’s website.
But a well-designed website, with a clear call to action, guides the shopper and helps them when they’re about to make a purchase decision.

For example, you might be selling a high-value product, let’s say, just for example purposes, a garden room.

But if you add a CTA that says, why not sign up for our monthly newsletter?

How can we design a low-fidelity wireframe?

You might hear your web designer’s say are building a low-fidelity wireframe using content blocks.

So this could simply be setting out a block which shows where the text is and another block that shows where the picture is.
Sometimes, these need to be high fidelity design designed, to give you an excellent understanding of how the website could look when finished, or low fidelity is just like a rough sketch, as if somebody made it with a pen and paper.

So, how these wireframes are created depends on the software the web designers are using.

They might have content management systems (CMS), allowing wireframes to be created in the CMS.

Alternatively they might use a wireframe designing programme to design wireframes.

Why we think you should ask for an interactive wireframe to be created

As we discussed earlier, there are low-fidelity and high-fidelity wireframes. You can take this a step further and create “interactive wireframes”, which are basically wireframes that you can click on and use the different elements, such as the buttons.
So basically, you’re getting your website, but if it’s not finished, it’s just a rough outline of what the website will look like and the buttons you can use to press.

How does using wireframes improve the web design process?

So we would highly recommend that your web design business use wireframes for you get an idea of how the website could look before it’s finished. It also allows input from, say, the company director for the marketing teams, so you can make changes to the website before is actually been fully designed.

Do you require a brand-new website to be designed in Cardiff?

Cardiff is a capital city, and that like most capital cities throughout United Kingdom there are a massive amount of web design companies to choose from.

However, many companies choose us, because our designers have over 10 years’ experience designing websites.

We can also offer the following services:

• Organic SEO
• Website design
• WordPress web design
• Drupal web design
• Joomla! website design

We can actually offer also offer to design a brochure website, complete with 7-pages for just £1000.
If this has you interested in any of the marketing services that we can offer, when why not get on the dog and bone, that’s phone and have a chat with us today.