 Great photo by picjumbo.com We recently worked on a project, for an ad agency, in which they gave us a 22-page PDF wireframe of a new, in-progress website for a client of theirs. Sometimes we create website wireframes for our clients; other times, like this, we’re tasked with helping to populate others' wireframes.
While we could simply tell you about what we did for this client, we want to broaden this article to make it more useful for you. A website—your website—is a big deal. It’s your face to the internet world. You want to get it right. Question everything When we create wireframes for our own clients, we create them as easy-to-follow Word docs, written in outline form. We have a nice article on how you can easily make one of those, too; be sure to check it out here. When we create wireframes for our clients, we always take a customer-back approach: Who is the website trying to reach? What are their needs? What do we want them to do, i.e., what is the call-to-action? More often than not, for our clients who happen to be consultants, the call-to-action or CTA is “book a demo.” So all of this will be well thought-out. You need to think this out, in detail, before you craft your wireframe. We can’t assume that everyone is so diligent. Fortunately, our ad-agency client, in this story, was. That said, we still had questions. Poring through the 22 pages of boxes and arrows and dashed lines, we wanted to know what their client was trying to accomplish, who their audiences were, the tone they wanted to convey, and what the CTA was for each audience. Nicely, they’d created what we’d call a “three-door” website. Their client serves three different audiences, and so there was a clickable tile (“door”) for each, right on the home page. As it turns out, these three audiences were largely different, but still had some traits—and needs—in common. This helped us to develop a unified tone for the overall business, while still addressing the needs of each target audience. Now think of your website and its audiences: Of course they’re different. But how are they similar? What might they have in common? Asking these kinds of questions can help you elevate the entire site and make it more effective. The brain dump Our ad-agency client didn’t want the typical “fill in the spaces” type of web-writing project from us. Rather, they wanted us to brainstorm lots of ideas for each high-level section of the site, so they could pick, choose, and mix-and-match at their will. This was, for us, fun. It was a headline and body-copy free-thought zone, and we came up with tons of stuff for them… which we then selectively edited down, so that they’d actually get 100-percent usable stuff to choose from. In the end, we delivered a 34-page document, consisting primarily of headlines, subheads, and intro body-copy teasers. Fast-forward to the conclusion of this site’s gestation, and we were happy to see lots of our stuff employed in the finished product. So the takeaway is that there’s more than one way to do this. Our ad-agency client gave us a super-structured document, but then told us to freewheel when we got it. Conversely, we’ve worked on other website projects where there are actual slugs of approved copy baked right into the wireframe itself, and we’ll be given very strict input to create very strict output. We can work either way. Have a website challenge on your plate? Contact us. We’d be happy to help!
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