Cook your way to the top with wireframes
I’ll admit it! I just wasn’t blessed with the good cooking gene that everyone in my family seems to have inherited. Before I was finally able to admit defeat and accept my culinary shortcomings, I simply couldn’t understand why my dishes weren’t delicious. What was I doing wrong? Finally, I realized why the taste wasn’t ever quite right. I wasn’t planning my dish properly or thinking through just how I wanted it to look or taste. Instead, I was blindly following directions, thinking that by just mixing the right ingredients together with a bit of this and that thrown in, I would produce a culinary masterpiece guaranteed to elicit scores of compliments from admiring guests. Alas! The only result I got was a table full of puckered lips.
Just as in cooking, you might have the necessary “ingredients” for designing a website, but without a wireframe or any form of foundation from which to build, you may not experience an efficient and effective outcome – a website that produces results.
Ingredients for wireframe a la success:
- Focus, 6 cups
- Branding, 2 cups
- Sitemap, 1
- User Experience, 4 tablespoons
- Functionality, 4 tablespoons
Directions: Mix together your focus and branding smoothly, in order to get rid of any unwanted clumps. Once the mix begins to thicken, stir in the rest of your ingredients until it creates an even consistency (sitemap). To concentrate on the user experience, take your batter and pour into each page of the wireframe, just enough so that when you add usability and functionality, everything comes together to form a wireframe that is ready to be baked. Bake the mixture in your secured server for about 45 minutes, or until all client edits have been made. Measurements can be adjusted accordingly, but be careful how you modify your ingredients, for once the wireframe is fully baked, it may become more difficult and time-consuming should you decide to make any revisions later in the process. (The wireframe helps to guide the design and development).
Cooking time: Place in the oven with an agency that understands the importance of a wireframe’s ingredients and the strategic direction.
Servings: Feeds visitors with a targeted website that increases sales and elicits positive responses from clients and prospects.
A wireframe doesn’t just provide structure and stability. It provides a foundation from which your vision for success can develop. It is the essential ingredient that completes the dish—providing that “je ne sais quoi” if you will—and guarantees a website that is more organized, easier to navigate and more appealing to the visitor.