

By taking the time to create at least a basic wireframe, you can make sure that your designs will take into account all the different page elements that need to go into the design, and that they’re positioned in the best possible way. Unless the site you’re designing is incredibly minimal and simple, wireframing helps clarify exactly what needs to be on the different page types of your website and assures to the client that they are getting their money’s worth with their online marketing effort. Wireframing is really the first step in the design process. Why You Should Wireframe Your Web Designs This guide covers everything you need to know about website wireframes to get started. You must be able to impress your clients by showing care and dedication to their marketing efforts, or they will just go to another agency. Marketing is no longer just direct mail and billboards, it’s much more than that. Wireframes can come in handy when you’re communicating with clients, as it allows them to visualize your ideas more easily than when you just describe them verbally. Wireframing is an important part of the web design process, especially for more complex projects. I’d love to hear how you go about creating your sitemaps.Most designers wireframe their designs in one way or another, even if it just involves them making quick sketches on the back of some scratch paper. Please share your favourite tool/software below in the comments. Do you have a favourite tool for creating sitemaps?
OMNIGRAFFLE SITEMAP STENCILS DOWNLOAD
Matt Haltom has one on Dribbble you can download for free. OmniGraffle has something called ‘stencils’ for quick sitemap generation. All you have to do is format a text box using “-” and “-” to set subpages. It’s super quick and easy to create a sitemap using Balsamiq. Tyler Townley has a really great example on Dribbble. It will look great but can be very time-consuming.

Illustrator will allow you to get super fancy with your sitemap, you can actually ‘design’ it. Useful Site Map Toolsĭepending on how in-depth you want your sitemap to be, you can use any one of these tools/programs to build your next sitemap. Great, but these pages were not accounted for and since we have the client approved sitemap, it’s much easier to say, “no problem, we can add this page/section, but since it’s not accounted for on our sitemap, we’ll have to bill extra for it, and if approved, that will, of course, affect the project timelines.” Having that approved sitemap gives us a reference point to ensure projects don’t get out of hand and stay within the original scope. Sometimes clients like to think up new pages, even entire sections, for their website halfway through a project. that all have different layouts, you can assign templates to the pages so that everyone knows what pages share a similar view and which pages will have unique layouts – developers like having this, trust me. For instance, you have pages, posts, archives, etc. At this time of determining your pages, you can also use the sitemap to assign unique templates to the pages/sections. When it comes to planning your website, creating a sitemap will help ensure you account for all the pages needed for your site. And Clients get to make sure all pages and sections are accounted for during the sitemap approval process. Developers build their templates/views, setup menus and pages in the CMS based off of the approved sitemap. Designers will refer to the sitemap to make sure they’ve included all main and secondary navigation and items in design concepts. For instance, a Project Manager will use the sitemap to compare to when reviewing a copy deck supplied by a client or writer. Sitemaps benefit all of us (Project Managers, Designers, Developers, and Clients) differently. Important note: In this post, I’m referring to sitemaps as a pre-project document that shows the page hierarchy (see below) and not an HTML or XML on-site sitemap (I’ll let one of our SEO Gurus explain the importance of those). That said, having an approved sitemap before starting the project will benefit you in many ways, let’s explore the importance of a SiteMap. In the years and years, I’ve been doing this, I’ve managed to complete website projects both with and without the aid of a sitemap.
