What is WireFrames Web Design And 10 Tools To Create Wireframes
Web designing is not an easy task and for designing good stuff you need to do some rigorous, user-centered designing. Web designing has many stages and levels that you have to pass through before finalizing a design.
The Wireframes
A wireframe is a visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website. It is also known as a page schematic or screen blueprint. These wireframes provide low-priced and highly effective support for iterative design. The best thing about them is that they are extremely easy to create and change, where as changing a a coded web app is very tough. Wireframe of a web app displays a conceptual screen design and task flow.
You can create and test them. Because of their flexibility, they can prove to be really good when it comes to staying away from poorly conceived, ineffective designs.
At the beginning, your wireframes can be basic sketches on paper or a whiteboard, to help conceptualizing the user interface and task flow. These kinds of wireframes can be good enough for small projects, and you can start the development process. But for most of the projects, you would have to move from sketches to diagrams made with the help of some software like Adobe Illustrator, Visio, or OmniGraffle. These wireframes are really good for big projects as they can be changed easily and can also be distributed among the design team with ease.
The wireframe diagram illustrates the layout of a web page
So here are 10 Awesome Tools That Let You Create Web Design Wireframes. Check them out!
MockFlow
This is a great tool to use which designing and collaborating user interface mockups for the software and websites is possible. It boasts many inbuilt components and icons.
Axure
Axure is a really good tool for designers which lets them create wireframes, flow diagrams, prototypes, and specifications for apps and websites. It has many widgets like buttons, form fields, shapes, and dynamic elements that you can edit and format. You can even make your own custom widget libraries.
Balsamiq Mockups
This tool lets you draw digitally. You will have the ability of tweaking and rearranging controls with ease, and the product is really neat. It boasts about 75 inbuilt controls to pick from. You can design whatever type of app or website you want, from simple basic form to really advanced form. It is definitely a must try tool.
Pencil Project
It is a free addon for Firefox, which has some key features like inbuilt stencils, multi-page document support, and multiple export options. Simple yet useful.
HotGloo
This one is a totally web based tool that has many good features. You can drag-drop and scale items with ease. It also supports realtime collaboration.
Mockingbird
This tool is also web based and it also focuses on collaboration. It lets you link multiple mockups together and then preview them interactively to see the flow of your app.
Cacoo
It is a cool online drawing tool that lets you make may different types of diagrams like site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts.
ProtoShare
This one is a handy online prototyping tool that focuses on collaboration. Team members have the ability of reviewing work and providing timely feedback, ideas, and suggestions on clickable wireframes or creative content.
iPlotz
iPlotz is a great tool that lets you quickly make clickable, navigable mockups and wireframes for prototyping websites and software apps.
OmniGraffle
It is an app for Mac OS that boasts various tools that lets you create awesome wireframes and mockups, but it is also really good when it comes to creating all types of charts and diagrams.
I highly recommend Keynotopia. I’ve used it for iPhone prototyping but they have bundles for other phone/desktop/web apps. Saves a LOT of time and like the other products mentioned above you can make clickable prototypes that can be annotated and exported to the iPhone for testing.
I fully recommend MockupTiger. It is completely webbased html5 and provides both sketchy vs normal look
Vectorized widgets
Chart and graph widgets
Great list! I really think the value of wire framing is very under rated!
Thanks for including ProtoShare in your listing of prototyping tools!
It’s really important to us that we encapsulate the creative planning process (wireframing, prototyping, design comps, live web views, etc) into a single tool as well as bringing in stakeholders to experience and share feedback of a project’s progress.
We’ve got new updates and processes coming soon that support this notion and we look forward to continue helping the interactive development industry do what you all do best: designing (and developing) for a better world.
We’re always open to feedback and fielding questions to those interested in ProtoShare: customerservice [at] protoshare.com.
Cheers,
andrea
@ProtoShare
Also check out FrameBox – fast and simple service to create mockups.