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Wireframing is one of the most recent design techniques for designing web sites. The whole idea about wireframing is that it describes the skeleton of a website just like the wireframes form the skeletons of statues. The skeleton describes the basic elements of the site, i.e. those elements that define structure, page layout and the interaction flow from page to page. Wireframes are extremely low-tech and therefore very well suited to easily move elements around, the ideal site-sketching technique. As soon as the basic ideas about the sites purpose, users and content are known, it is good to start doing some sketches.Doing such sketches using wireframes literally means to draw frames of wire for page elements i.e. labeled boxes. A web page is then built up out of several boxes. This allows designers to play with the functions of page areas, layout a navigation system, determine the main context areas and even nasty aspects such as banner placing.
Figure 1 A wireframe and the final page design After some fiddling around with the labeled boxes, the boxes must be refined in terms of their content. The purpose of wireframes is to define the skeleton of the page and not the graphical design of it. It is therefore important to stay with using boxes and only the bare basics of layout. It should define scale and proportion but not in terms of pixels and exact location. So it should be both rough and accurate at the same time. Later on the graphic design will be done on the basis of the wireframe, see Figure 1. One of the nice things about wireframes is that they are very easy to change. Most designers use standard packages such as Word/PowerPoint/Illustrator to draw the wireframes. Resizing or moving boxes is done
quickly and basic alignment functions allow the wireframes to look almost like technical drawings. Another advantage of using standard packages is that clients dont need any special programs to open the wireframes on their computers. They can be easily exchanged. When designing a page it is important to follow some basic guidelines. First of all, make sure you are working on scale. Use a portrait oriented page and draw an 800x600 rectangle with marks for the browserhead first so that you know where the fold is. The portrait page will allow around 2 views to be visible, which is what should be the maximum in most cases anyway. Second, find out which font sizes you can use. Usually an 8 or 9 points font size corresponds to a normal text size in a browser. Of course, this will not make your design exactly at scale but it will be loosely on scale. This allows you to know quickly if everything will fit or will be visible above the fold. If wireframes are not on scale you may find some unpleasant surprises later on in the design process. Since wireframes are good because of their communicative value, make sure your wireframes are consistent. If something is a link underline it. If you use widgets such as comboboxes or listboxes, make sure they are recognizable and always look the same. It is handy to have an example palette at hand, for example:
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