It’s great, you have a vision in your mind of how you would like your website to look, maybe you’ve got a mood board and some examples of other people’s websites and a list of pages you need to create in order to develop the perfect website but have you considered just how important it is to sketch out and mock up a layout for your masterpiece? In this blog post, we discuss the importance of sketching and wireframing.
Even Mona Lisa was once a sketch
Before any great design is created there is usually at least one underlying sketch that helps develop something into a masterpiece. The ancient Egyptians would use a red pencil of sorts and a grid system to carefully plan and layout their hieroglyphic wall art before they painted in their designs.
In the modern-day, sketching web design ideas with pencil and paper can really help to think about things before you start digitally creating them. It helps to decipher your thoughts and see what is most important to the business of the website you are creating laying out, call to action, where to place images, and how you might tell a story through the user journey. Sketching doesn’t have to be pretty, it’s just a stage of getting some ideas down on paper but once you have those in place you can take things a step forward and create a skeleton for your web design using a free website design tool called Mockflow.
Mockflow helps you wireframe your design
Mockflow has various programs one of which is a wireframe application that has various elements and page layouts to help you construct the skeletal layout of your design before adding any graphical elements or CSS styling to the design of the site. It has most elements that you could ever need from Text, buttons, arrows, accordion-style dropdowns, and so on, and to create is fairly straightforward to use.
The great thing about creating a mockup before you really get down to your website it will stop you from thinking from a usability and structure point of view before any visual design influences the process of design.
It is possible to design without mockups but primarily a website should always be functional before it is beautiful otherwise it’s users will not be able to find the complete benefit of your site.
Do you use mockups before creating websites or do you go straight into the visual design process?
At The Change Creative, we believe it’s important to carefully layout websites before designing so that you can identify navigation problems early on and will be using https://www.mockflow.com/ with future clients that require a high level of design.