But sketching and refining ideas is not the only thing wireframes are good for! With a wireframe you can communicate your ideas and specifications to other stake holders in the project team. And as we all know, programmers speak a completely different language than designers, with a wireframe both parties communicate in a universal language: with animated pictures! The perfect thing about communicating on the basis of a wireframe is that your programmer can really see and experience what you want, ask the right questions and help finding solutions where certain (may be technical) requirements not have been considered (making changes in the concept necessary – lucky me who created a wireframe instead of spending long hours on designing all detailed pages first).

A website or interface wireframe is a first visual outline used in interface design and web development. With a wireframe, you plan and communicate the overall idea and structure of a website and specify it down to its pages. Wireframes have first been used in rapid paper prototyping in which interface concepts are drawn by hand with pen on paper. All elements of the website are just outlined (in the narrower sense of the word) and placeholders for pictures and other content (e.g. text) are used. Typically, wireframes with all link structures are completed before any artwork is developed.