I just wrote a post on why you should wireframe. I’m writing this one because I feel like I left something out.
The thing that kept me from wireframing—for the most part—was that I didn’t know what content to put on my webpage. There’s no point in wireframing if you don’t have some idea what content you’re going to put in your webpage (0r other document). Planning your content isn’t that hard, though. You don’t have to have everything all written out; obviously when you’re working with dynamic content things will change a lot.
You need to have a good idea of what your webpage or document is going to contain. You need to be able to plug your content (or a sample of your content) into your wireframe. A lot of people don’t want to do this because they’d rather just get started right away. This typically leads to skipping the wireframe step altogether, and ultimately to sloppy looking (though perhaps still pretty) webpages or documents.
So I guess the main lesson learned here is to plan ahead as much as you can. You’d be surprised how big a difference it makes.
