What is a website wireframe and why is it important?

If you were planning to make a papier-mache sculpture, you wouldn’t pile straight in and start sticking bits of damp newspaper together in the hope that the finished result would look good; instead, you would build a core structure out of wire netting to give structure and shape to your finished project.

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Creating a website follows a similar principle. Although it is true that some designers just pile in and hope for the best, you need to set out the basic structure of the site before any coding takes place if you want to achieve a relevant and effective website that visitors will enjoy using.

Creating a skeleton site

According to a recent Forbes article, the wireframe serves as the bare bones of your website. This enables you to tailor your content and products in the most intuitive way so that web visitors do not have to struggle to find the information they are looking for.

Web designers refer to this initial development stage as ‘wireframing’. It is a crucial part of the process, particularly for large websites with lots of pages, products and content. It is only by spending a great deal of time and attention on the early stages of the project that you can be certain your finished website will be up to the task.

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Why wireframing matters

Allowing a website to develop as you create it could lead to all sorts of problems, including duplicate content, inconsistent navigation, and an inability for the visitor to find the products or information they are searching for. This is why a good web development team will take time to show you in detail how the wireframing stage will translate to the finished site.

Whether you opt for a WordPress website or employ a Drupal design agency, you will find numerous organisations, such as https://www.website-express.co.uk/service/drupal-design-development-agency, that will spend time ensuring your site is created from the bottom up. This will result in an increase in user satisfaction.

Spending time at the wireframing stage of creating an intuitive user interface for your website enables potential problems to be identified, and indeed rectified, at an early stage, saving you time, trouble and money in the long run. Knowing that your website design is based entirely around the needs of the website users ensures complete satisfaction with the finished results.