Wireframes, a pen to paper approach

Blueprints for architects are said to allow a project team to visualise the 'big plan', fast forward to 2020 where a website is an asset to businesses, UX designers have their own blueprints for web design- Wireframes.

For business owners, designing and developing websites that function across multiple screens is a very important part of their services, for UX designers wireframes become their visual blueprint in making a website for a business.

Wireframes can be as basic as they come, minimum shapes, limited coloring, and styling, the sole focus has to be figuring out the layout, placement of content and navigation from one page to another, like the example below.

Wireframes allow you to think about your business needs and help define goals for your website if you look at the example above, YouTube aims to keep a viewer on the page for as long as they can, by having multiple videos previewed on the right-hand side, it means the viewer can focus on one video, but also has the opportunity to 'shop' six other videos simultaneously.

Although it looks simple it's all about knowing the business's goals and needs to create visual assets that can then be turned around to ensure both the designer and client are on the same page. If there are multiple departments feeding into a website it also allows for flex to combine these goals. It's easy to skip simple steps like this but what you'll end up with is endless design time (and costs) with little direction other than "I want a website to sell X".