Wireframe

How To Wireframe A Website in 3 Easy Steps

What Is a Wireframe?

Wireframes are a collection of placeholders (black and white outlined shapes) that represent how a portion of a website product could be designed. Each shape represents a respective design element on the page, such as an image, a logo, menu items, buttons, and so on.

Wireframing is the web design and user experience design technique that serves as a low-fidelity mockup to illustrate the arrangement and layout of these placeholder shapes, which collectively form the basic foundation and structure of a web page or digital screen.

Why You Should Wireframe Your Website

As a web creator, one of the key values in building a wireframe is that it conveys layout ideas, content, and overall page-level design of the website you’re creating.

Another significant benefit of the wireframing process is that they provide great clarity into how information will be organized on the screen, otherwise known as the page’s information architecture.

How to Wireframe a Website

Step 1: Create a Wireframe

One of our methods of creating wireframes is through Sketch. But really, any prototyping tool of your choice will work equally as well.

Every design element should be in black and white, with no color or design detail. It’s a simple, old-fashioned drawing that focuses solely on structure and layout.

Step 2: Turn Wireframe into Mockup

Now that you’re well versed in the importance of wireframing when designing a website, let’s talk about what the next step is once you have your actual wireframe.

The first step when going from wireframe to prototype is duplicating your wireframe. You’ll want to keep an original copy of your wireframe for future reference or future revisions. The file you’ll want to edit is the duplicate and not the original.

Then, I recommend the following steps:
1. Imagery
Replace your image placeholders with the relevant images and illustrations. This includes your logo and any other images, icons, illustrations you plan on using.
2. Text and Font
If you’ve used Lorem ipsum text, replace it with the real text, and apply your font and sizing of choice accordingly. If you’ve used your actual text, then apply your font and sizing directly.
3. Buttons
Apply your button design and sizing to buttons.
4. Visual Design
Apply your color scheme and all other visual design details.
5. Alignment
Adjust the alignment, spacing, margins, minimum height, minimum width, and all details related to symmetry.
6. Elementor Widgets
Identify which Elementor widgets you can use for each element on your prototype.

Step 3: Convert Your High-Fidelity Mockup Into an Interactive Prototype

An interactive prototype is, as the name suggests, an interactive version of your high-fidelity mockup where the designer has added click targets to the design and set response for each possible user interaction on each screen.

The goal of your interactive prototype is to add clickability to your existing high-fidelity mockup so that you can test the design’s user actions, and overall usability and functionality.

A topic of its own in the world of user experience, user testing is a stage in the design process where designers test the prototype – either by finding users and/or testing the prototype themselves, to confirm their screen designs and see if the clickability and overall UX/UI ‘make sense’ to their target audience. And, of course, to identify any mistakes or unclear design elements that need revision or fine-tuning.

Wireframing Is the Way to Go

Now that you have a strong understanding of how important wireframing and prototyping are to your design workflow, you can expect great things for your upcoming Elementor projects. Keep in mind that the issue of which widgets you can use to translate your design choices into the Elementor platform is not a ‘black and white’ matter. There are often multiple ways to create one type of design in Elementor; it’s just a matter of creativity, which is something all web creators are well-versed in, to say the least.

How to wireframe your websites in 3 easy ways