Benefits of Website Wireframes for Business Owners

Wireframing is the one step in the web design process that is tempting for clients to hurry through, but creating a sturdy foundation on which to build your final visual design is paramount to having a site that is going to give you the return on your investment that you are looking for.

A website that was well thought out in the wireframe stage, leads to a final site that not only looks great, but can also increase conversions, generate leads and sell products more efficiently by designing for your user. After all, your users are the people who would be opening their hearts and wallets to your business - it’s pretty important to make things intuitive for them to use. In short, this is a big part of how you maximize revenue from your website.

Wireframing Defined

A wireframe is essentially the blueprint for a website and the process of wireframing is the creation of the wireframe. During wireframing, we lay out the basic components of the site, such as the navigation, features, buttons, and any interactive elements. At Rise, we take careful consideration of our clients’ users - this is a philosophy in webdesign called user centered design. When we arrange the components of your website on the page, we prioritize information and actions so that your users are able to complete the tasks that they came to your site for (for example, a user might come to your site to learn more about one of your products) and users are encouraged to accomplish the tasks that you want them to complete (contact you or purchase a product).

How Wireframes Fit into the Design Process

• First, of course, we talk to our clients about what they want and need in their website. We also talk about what their clients or customers might need from the website. This process includes a pretty deep dive into understanding our clients’ target audience and their preferences.
• Once we’ve established the goals for the site and we know who we’re talking to, we can start emphasizing content and working out overall architecture of the site. Once we know the sections and pages, we start crafting the path we want users to take based on their goals. For example, if most of your users searching for XYZ land on your homepage, we want to give them a very clear way to do XYZ and to hopefully convert into a lead for you along the way.
• When the overall site structure has been established, wireframes are made to create the layout and mock up the user experience.
• Once the wireframe has gone through a rigorous internal review, we present them to our client to make sure that the user goals and conversion paths are met. On approval, the wireframes go to the visual designer who takes the wireframer’s functional structure and makes it a valuable visual experience, incorporating colors, images, textures and so on.

Over the years, we’ve found that the visual design is what most people are interested in and want us to get to a.s.a.p. That said, time has also taught us that wireframing is a critical step to providing the initial, low-fidelity visual design to give our clients an idea of how their goals fit on their site and lay the path to user conversion. It’s not the emotional payoff of visual artistry, but there is beauty in reliable, well-executed functionality. And our clients are happy to receive a site that is intuitive to use and guides users to become customers and/or sales leads.

How It’s Done

Wireframing is largely an organizational task of working with a website’s audience, their goals, and information organization using the lens of contemporary webdesign principles. In particular, we focus on things like grouping related information, allocating enough space, presenting the most important information in prominent locations, including calls to action for users in the most optimial places, and, of course, lining everything up nicely.

Once everything is laid out, we make clickable areas on pages to simulate what the site should do when you click on links and buttons. For example, clicking the submit button on a sign up form can go to confirmation page, giving an experiential outline of the final site navigation and functionality. Wireframes are where that functionality gets mocked up.

What Business Owners Need to Know Before Reviewing Wireframes

When we present a wireframe to our client, we don’t do it blindly. Instead, we try to frame it appropriately, so our client knows what to expect. If you’re getting ready to present or receive a wireframe, it’s important to understand the following:

• This is not the final design. When we present wireframes, we make sure to inform our clients that this is not what their site will look like in the end after the visual designer does his job. We invite clients to look at the wireframe as the blueprint that it is and explain plainly that where they see a gray box, that is simply to indicate where an image or a button will be inserted. In the same way that a building blueprint doesn’t specify the exact type of wallpaper each room will have, a wireframe doesn’t try to convey all the details that the final design will have. We’ll also go through the how the user goals were executed and the planned conversion paths for users. This allows our clients to really put themselves in the shoes of their user, so they can get a clear idea of what it’ll be like for their users to be on the site. Though it’s not the final design, it is definitely a similar functional experience.
• What you see is what you get. If something hasn’t been planned for in the wireframe, there is no plan for it to be in the website. If there are no spaces planned for images, then we’re not thinking about pictures to put there. If their goals did not include a blog page, there won’t be one in the wireframes. We encourage our clients to take the time to look through the wireframes to make sure that we are all on the same page. This is the critical point at which to make final additions to a website’s functionality, and here’s why…

What is An Ounce of Prevention Worth to You?

A website that isn’t targeted to your users’ needs results in missed revenue possibilities. How often have you looked at a homepage, didn’t see what you needed and then left? Those kinds of websites are so poorly thoughtout that users, like you, don’t even have the chance to convert into a sale. How would your experience change if you landed on the homepage, saw something that confirmed you were in the right place, and then directed you to the answer you were looking for? Assuming the products and prices are of equal value, statistics show that users choose the website that is easy to use and catered to them more often. Even if your website wasn’t terrible and it was able to give you some leads, most of our clients wouldn’t say no to more leads from their website. How much is an on going increase in leads worth to you?

There’s also the short term to consider too. Late decisions regarding website functionality can be costly and wireframes are important tools for catching omissions early. Unless you have an unlimited budget to work with, consider the wisdom of this process in this context:

• Wireframing a home page might take 1-2 hours.
• A full visual design for the same page might take closer to 16 hours.
• A change at the full design stage can take 3-5 hours.
• A wireframe change might take 15 minutes.

We do recommend real world tests once a website is launched to improve the user experience and conversion rates over time too. It helps your site stay on top of trends as your users and the industry evolves. Rather than learning it “the hard way” by going through several redesigns, we plan for that exceptional user experience in the beginning through wireframing - that way we’re just tweaking what we have for campaigns rather than starting from scratch. Why? We believe that every one of our clients has the ability to change the world and we try to give them the best shot possible to be able to do that on the web.

So what can wireframes do for you? Save time, save money in the website development process, and if done well, they’ll increase your return on investment by generating more leads and selling more products than a website that wasn’t carefully thought out.