The Importance of Wireframing for Your Website Design

When you see the final product of a website design, it’s hard to see all of the hard work that went into it. After, all you’re seeing the great design, the intuitive navigation, and the attention-grabbing visual and written content.
You don’t see the hours spent making sure that the design is optimized for mobile, or the number of tries that it took the design team to get that navigation down. Another thing that’s quite unbelievable when seeing a website design is that this web design might have started out as a group of squares and shapes on a piece of paper.
Yes, that’s right, the truth is, when conceptualizing web designs in the beginning, a process called wireframing is often used. A wireframe is a very bare-bones visual concept of what a website is supposed to look like. It’s very skeletal in nature, and contains no color, images, or even text, in most cases.
Web design companies use wireframes to help clients see a basic idea of what their websites are going to look like, structure-wise, without getting distracted by external factors, like color and images. There are a number of additional reasons why wireframing is such a vital step in the beginning of the website design process.
It’s easier to make changes to a wireframe
One of the biggest advantages of a wireframe is the fact that it is much simpler to change elements on a wireframe as opposed to a mock-up or a prototype that you spent a lot of time building. Taking the time to address any issues early on during the wireframing process will save you more time and is more efficient than building the site’s design on a mock-up and having to make all the corrections and changes there.
Saves time and money in the long run
Since everything has been clarified and outlined during the wireframing process, this helps the design team avoid any mistakes that might occur because of miscommunication. All of the needed elements are in place, and the team knows exactly how to approach it, so there is no loss in productivity or cost because of encountering issues with how an element is supposed to be integrated into the design.
It helps you see which elements are to be prioritized
Creating a website design from scratch can be a rather confusing process. There’s so much that goes into a design that you may not know where to begin, or what to prioritize. Along the way, elements may be forgotten about, or features may not be properly implemented, which ends up in lost time. A wireframe helps the design team see what aspects of the design should be handled first, and how to proceed with the flow of designing the website.