Website Wireframe - A Comprehensive Guide

This guide is brought to you by ZenFrame, the simplest wireframe tool.

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A website wireframe is a rough outline of a website that provides information about the site's content, layout, and functionality. It often features lower-fidelity mockups that make it simpler to show an overall design for a user interface. These wireframes are typically not functional as they do not include programming or interaction design. This diagram communicates how the site will function by showing its main pages, navigational elements, and content.

What exactly are website wireframes, how are they used, and how to create them? Continue reading for more.

What Is A Website Wireframe?

A wireframe is a design template that provides the structure for a website. It helps in communication between developers and designers before the actual design takes place. This plan includes information about the placement of elements, navigation, and layout. It also explains how each page will look and what content it will contain.

Wireframes helps website developers and clients understand what the site will look like. They are typically in the form of sketches, diagrams, or mockups. Wireframes are used to identify where content is placed on a page, what elements will be used, and how they relate to each other.

Before building a new website, creating wireframes can be extremely helpful to align all stakeholders.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of A Website Wireframe

Advantages

When designing a website, it can be helpful to start with a wireframe of the site. A wireframe helps designers to simplify the site and keep in mind the content and aesthetics of each page. The wireframe will also help you determine what needs to be on each page, in terms of text, images, links, and buttons. Wireframes are useful because they give designers an idea of how the content will look and where they should place things.

As different industries have different customer flow, do in-depth research on customer personas to so you can create the most suitable wireframes.

Disadvantages

Although low-fidelity wireframes are very basic and fast to create, its simplicity can cause misunderstandings between stakeholders when discussing wireframes. Unfortunately, not all clients and stakeholders feel comfortable using the wireframe for work.

As a result of sketching on fixed layouts, wireframes may stifle creativity.

How To Create A Simple Website Wireframe?

Identify A Specific Goal

As mentioned about the importance of goals, it is suggested to define focus metrics that affect traffic flow and online sales. Once set up for a clear purpose, you can decide the content customers want to read.

Research The User Experience

Understanding the users' flow requires multiple testing to optimize features and functionality. At this stage, indicate all possible entry touch-points.

Subsequently, you will sketch the journey flow from the potential points. The wireframe should describe specifically interacting steps when a customer accesses the website.  

Determine The Size Of The Wireframe

Users get access to information through different devices such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Due to that reason, the size of the wireframe should be adaptive to the devices' screen.

Some typical size of screen type to your reference:

• Mobile screen' frame size: 1080px * 1920px
• Desktop screen' frame size: 768px * 1366px
• Tablet screen' frame size: 800px * 1280px or 1200px * 1920px

Start Designing Pages / Screens

Start adding in components or texts to pages / screens on your wireframe. Popular wireframe tool like ZenFrame can help make this process easy by providing pre-made components that you only need to drag and drop.

Gather Feedback

Even though wireframes are still basic prototypes of your websites, they are not fully functioning enough to be ready for real user testing. However, it still makes sense to gather feedback from employees or internal stakeholders to see if there's any errors or points to optimize further in the user flow.

With this feedback loop, you can then start to improve your wireframes even more.

Conclusion

Website wireframes are a blueprint for your website. They are the basis for all decisions about site pages, content and layout. Wireframes help you determine what content goes on which page, how many pages your website should have, how navigation should work, what elements to include in each page, and more.

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