It can be daunting to go from having an idea for a website to actually having it up and running and receiving visitors. Numerous people on your team will have questions, and you’ll need to make sure they understand your vision.
However, the process can be simplified and the desired results more easily envisioned if you approach website creation with an eye toward the fundamentals.
Making a wireframe is one of the first steps in developing a website. Creating wireframes is a crucial step in the user experience design process, as they serve as a blueprint for a website or mobile app.
Since creating a wireframe is a simple and fast process, it often goes through several iterations as users provide feedback on the proposed flow and features.
Wireframes are useful for conveying concepts to everyone from developers to stakeholders in the design process.
As such, this section will explain the purpose of wireframes, the various types of wireframes, and the prerequisites for creating your own.
Just What Is a Website Wireframe?
Wireframe Varieties
The Basics of Drawing a Sketch
Wireframing in Kadence WP: A Step-by-Step Guide
Conclusion: 5 Easy Steps to Creating a Wireframe
What Is a Wireframe for a Website?
A website’s wireframe is an early blueprint of the site’s structure and layout. Web design addresses issues like page structure, hierarchy of content, and navigation. Before a developer begins coding or a designer begins designing, it is necessary to plan out the structure, purpose, and interconnection of each page. In most cases, wireframes lack detailed content, colour schemes, and design decisions.
In this stage, the focus is on the functionality and user experience, which usually necessitates a number of mockups and testing iterations.
For this purpose, wireframing is ideal because, once you know the basics, you can quickly and easily create a wireframe of your website. To get your thoughts down on paper or a whiteboard, or with the help of other tools, sketch.
Types of Wireframes
There are three distinct types of wireframes, each representing a different level of detail. What follows is a list of them:
Low-fidelity Wireframes
These are the most basic wireframes, and they usually take the form of sketches on paper or whiteboards. They are the preliminary sketch of your ideas. Since the design will probably go through more revisions, the scale is off and the lines are just placeholders.
Mid-fidelity Wireframes
These wireframes improve accuracy with their true-to-scale presentation and can begin to distinguish between sections of content with varying line widths. These tasks can still be completed on paper, but grid or dot-grid notebooks are recommended.
High-fidelity Wireframes
Scale, varying line widths, and value are used in the most detailed wireframes to clearly convey the hierarchy of each page.
Don’t get hung up on selecting fonts just yet, but feel free to resize and emphasise them to better show how ideas are connected. If you want to get the details right, you should probably use a wireframing tool like Figma or Balsamiq.
All three types of wireframes may be made at some point in a project, or the creator may skip high-fidelity wireframes altogether in favour of jumping straight to prototyping.
How To Create a Wireframe
A website’s wireframe should be created with the team’s input, preferences, and requirements in mind.
Here are some guidelines to follow to make your wireframe as useful as possible:
1. Do User Research
Wireframing is primarily used to answer questions about how users will interact with your website.
You need to know who your users are and why they’re visiting your website before you can design a good user experience for them.
Therefore, it is important to study user personas and document the website’s use cases. You can learn more about your website’s users, their goals, the actions they’ll take to achieve those goals, and the website’s reactions by reviewing their use cases.
Knowing the user’s general expectations for a website’s performance is also crucial. Look at comparable sites to get ideas for how to best organise your own content.
2. Outline the Overall Flow of Your Website
The overall flow of your website can be designed once you know where visitors are coming from and where they will be going.
Essentially, you have just laid the groundwork for your website’s information architecture. In order to keep visitors engaged, your website must be well-structured.
Structures such as hierarchies, topics, and sequential ordering are all viable options for arranging content. Whatever method you choose, it should be applied uniformly across your entire website.
Use flowcharts to plan the progression of your website’s pages.
3. Iterate on Sketches
Learning how to create a wireframe starts with putting your thoughts on paper. Repeatedly improving upon your sketches is the next step.
Follow these questions as a road map to a more functional and user-friendly website:
- Structure – What data should be presented initially?
- How can you improve the user’s experience by making it simpler for them to achieve their objectives?
- What do people anticipate seeing?
- Tasks – What should the reader do next on a given page?
4. User Test
When you have an initial plan for your website’s flow and functionality, it’s time to solicit feedback from others.
Website aesthetics are important, but user experience should always come first. Not even the most skilled user experience designers can anticipate every possible reaction a website’s visitors may have. Because of this, it’s crucial to get feedback from real users on your wireframe.
Don’t worry too much about conducting a massive study just yet; small-scale tests involving your coworkers should suffice for now.
In contrast, the closer a tester is to your ideal user, the more useful their input is likely to be. Then you’ll know exactly what information to include in your wireframe in order to make it work for your target demographic.
5. Develop High Fidelity Wireframes
Now that we’ve made all the big calls, it’s time to draw up a wireframe with the UI design in mind.
Make sure you can communicate your vision for the website’s design as clearly as possible before you start working on it yourself or handing it off to a graphic designer.
Start adding detailed text in order to make a high-fidelity wireframe. The placement of headers, buttons, and calls to action will help you fine-tune your website without the need for extensive long-form copy. You have the option of incorporating things like colour and logos.
In contrast to low-fidelity wireframes, which can be quickly understood and tested, high-fidelity wireframes help convey the finer details and visual communication of the user interface.
Subtle alterations to your website’s colour scheme can have a profound effect on how visitors engage with and expect your site to function.
Once you have a wireframe that you’re happy with, you can either start building your website or proceed to the next phase, which involves interactive prototyping and the addition of functionality.
How To Create a Wireframe in Kadence WP
Although a pen and paper are all you need to sketch out your initial wireframe ideas, you will likely need a wireframing tool when it comes time to add an element to the page at the correct size.
Options abound, and they range in level of challenge and available features. An expert tool is not required for wireframing, but it can greatly accelerate the process.
Using Kadence WP, you can create a wireframe for your WordPress site with a simple drag-and-drop interface.
This is how:
After adding Kadence Blocks to your WordPress installation, you can create a new post as usual. Then, select Design Library from the main menu.
Choose the Wireframe Library menu item.
Multiple wireframe examples are provided. There are many options, but you can narrow them down by selecting filters based on their intended use.
Final Thoughts — How To Create a Wireframe: 5 Simple Steps
For any user experience designer or conscientious website owner, a wireframe is a must-have tool. You can improve the quality of your website’s user experience, share your thoughts with others, and get feedback from visitors before making any final decisions with the help of these plans.
If you want to plan out your website but don’t know where to begin, a wireframe can help.
When supplemented with user research, information architecture, and additional detail, a high-fidelity wireframe ensures that your team can build a website that meets your needs and those of your users.
If you’re having trouble imagining your ideal website with just wireframes, Bluehost’s Website Builder may be the answer. Its user-friendly interface allows you to plan ahead and try things out with minimal effort.
