the best way to plan a website, a wireframe!

One of the most important (scratch that…THE most important) aspects of building a website is to construct a wireframe.

What is a wireframe?

"put the meat on the bones"

A wireframe is in essence the skeleton of your website. As my old history teacher would say, once you have the skeleton, you can start to put the meat on the bones. Too many web designers just start throwing lumps of flesh around and whilst you may be able to make pretty websites like this, they will likely have very little structure.

A wireframe contains no pictures, and usually no body text either. Once you start puzzling over colours, images and wording, you can totally lose the plot with a wireframe.

So a wireframe is a blueprint of how a site will be laid out, and where your links will be placed, and where important elements of each page will be structured. The point of the wireframe is to create a structure that focuses on how you want information to flow through your site and how you want your website visitors to travel from one page (or piece of information) to the next.

If you can be disciplined enough to construct a wireframe, you’ll find that the design and wording fall into place much more quickly later on, and most importantly your site will become a ruthless selling machine. After all, there’s nothing worse than visiting a website that provides a service you would like, but you just can’t figure out how to get in touch, or enquire, or find the next piece of info right~?

The biggest problem for a web design company in using a wireframe model to correctly plan a website, is that it can be a little under-whelming for the customer. The exciting bit is seeing your website come to life with imagery and colour and content. We understand that’s when the project starts to feel reel and everyone can get on board. Sometimes I can see the disappointment in a clients face when we present a text-less, colourless, image-less model of their website. It’s a particularly brave thing to do for a web design company when pitching for new business, but time and time again we’ve proved it’s the only way to build a site of any substance.

Note: the larger your website and more complex your proposition, the more important a wireframe becomes.

So before you whip out that colour wheel and start looking for metaphoric pictures of seedlings, take a while to plan your site. Sure it’s dull, but the benefits are profound.

Photos courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons license from users METROgrl