Wireframing 101: 7 Benefits Behind Wireframing Your Website Redesign

When your website is being developed, it can be cumbersome to recognize major flaws with the design that require you to go back to the drawing board.

Skipping wireframes also causes a loss of time and money, fractured trust, and missed deadlines. Needless to say, it is not worth the headache a half-planned design might cause.

With hand-drawn wireframes, it's much easier to discard an idea and try a new approach. This makes you much more willing to try a variety of ideas before the right one comes to you. It also makes you more accepting of feedback and testing before you ‘OK’ anything.

2. Allows For Clarification of Features

Certain pages you need may require slightly more attention due to their functionality or features you want to integrate into them.  Rather than guessing what features will work best during development or design, you can think about the functionality early on and recognize and remedy any issues.

It also allows you to think about smaller scale functionality such as search boxes, button placement, animations, etc. You may find out you don’t need certain elements at all or can drastically simplify them.

3. Displays the Architecture of Your Site

You may think you have your site mapped out exactly how it should be in your head, but it’s always good practice to write it all out for you and your team. This way, you can triple check that it’s laid out in a way that flows naturally for your users.

This also ensures that everyone is on the same page with the website’s visual architecture and avoids the possibility of confusion further in the redesign process.

4. Saves You Time & Money

This is one of the most critically important benefits that wireframing offers; saving you time on the overall project and preventing unnecessary spending on issues that could have been avoided.

Wireframing allows your designs to be more calculated, so you have an easier time producing concepts that you know offer a better UX.

Your development team will also better understand what they are building since the initial concept has been communicated to them. This helps you avoid spending time hacking together bandaids to errors you find later in development.

Together, all this helps you prevent spending money on extra hours you need to put in to refine the product so it's ready for deployment.

5. Makes Content Development More Effective

If you aren't taking a content-first approach and are instead using brainstormed content (or maybe none at all), wireframing can help make content development easier on your copywriters.

With wireframes, writers will be able to gauge how long their content should be for each page so it ends up being perfectly tailored to the site’s design.

This also allows you to organize your content to ensure maximum readability, optimal font size, and properly arranged lists and headers. For example, large paragraphs of content can be difficult for users to read, so breaking it up into smaller paragraphs with images may provide more attractive on the eyes.

6. Shows Your Information Hierarchy

Since your wireframes are all about organizing your site’s structure and information, it’s important that you figure out the hierarchy of the items on the page.

This lets you figure out what information is most important to your users, how they should read it, and what actions you want them to take on your pages and make your design reflect that. Organizing this also lets you know what’s unnecessary for your users.

7. Website Responsiveness

While it may seem a bit early, I see the wireframing stage as a excellent point to begin thinking about how your website will be laid out on other devices.

It’s easy to get caught up on the desktop/laptop layout of your website that you begin to become blind to the fact that over half your users may actually be accessing your website via mobile.

Wireframing forces you to make sure your site will adapt well once scaled down, or reveal to you that an application may be a better option on mobile.

If you already have a website, check to see how your current users currently interact with it. It’ll give you direction so you know what issues your current site has that can be remedied in your redesign.