A wireframe is the skeleton of a page: what goes where and in what order, without color, photography or final copy. Headline, proof, services, form, footer — boxes and labels. The unfinished look is deliberate.
Briefly explained
- A layout sketch, with no styling.
- It settles structure and priority before design starts.
- Stripping the visuals forces the conversation onto the content.
- Changing it costs an hour. Changing a built page costs a rebuild.
Why strip out the visuals?
Because people review what they can see.
Put a finished design in front of a room and the conversation goes to the photo and the shade of the button. The questions that decide whether the page works — what it says first, what it asks for, where the proof sits — never get asked at all.
What are the questions it should settle?
For a service business, the structural questions are the commercial ones.
- Is the phone number reachable on the first screen, on a phone? See above the fold.
- Does the top of the page name the service and the area?
- Where does the proof sit relative to the ask?
- How many actions compete on the same screen?
Where does it sit in a project?
Wireframe, then copy, then visual design, then build.
That order matters more than it sounds. Copy written to fit a finished design is how pages end up saying nothing in particular, because the layout decided how many words were allowed before anyone knew what needed saying.
Who should look at it?
Whoever knows what customers ask before they book.
That is usually the person who answers the phone, and they are usually not invited to the review. They will tell you in five minutes which objection the page has to handle in the first screen, which is the most valuable thing anyone says in the whole project.
What do the terms mean?
- Wireframe: Structure, no styling.
- Mockup: What the finished page will look like.
- Prototype: A clickable version, used to test a flow.
- Hierarchy: The order of importance the layout communicates.
- Landing page: The page type this process matters most for.
Owner questions
