Website Prototypes: An Essential Part of the Web Design Process

The Web Showroom is the pioneer of the online website prototype in the Australian website design industry. A prototype is a fully functioning website devoid of graphical elements. This is the first step we take in the process of building your website. Rather than first developing the visual aspects of your website, we build your website as a prototype in black and white. This is a vital stage in web design and ensuring that your website will do what you need it to do, rather than worrying about how it looks. We don’t believe that any website should be built without a prototype.

What About Website Wireframes?

In the days before prototyping, our web designers relied on wireframes as the pre-design ‘strategy’ stage. Wireframes are flat files typically supplied to clients as a pdf. The problem with wireframes is that they don’t offer the website owner a real insight into how their future website will actually work. As a result of our frustrations with wireframes, and their ineffectiveness, we developed the prototype as the optimum way to focus on website strategy prior to look and feel.

An analogy we use is that a wireframe is like an architect’s drawing, whilst a prototype would be the equivalent of your architect allowing you to walk through your proposed new home and allow you to change various aspects free of charge; “let’s move the stairs, let’s change the roof height and let’s swap the bathroom and kitchen…”

Put simply, prototyping gives our customers an unfair advantage. You will get to make core changes to how your website will function based on actually experiencing how it functions. You get to test your website as your customers will, checkout a product through your e-commerce, subscribe to your mailing list, view your gallery and/or any other functions deployed onto your website. At the prototype stage we encourage as much feedback on useability, site structure and page layout as possible.

Would You Like To Learn More About Our Web Design Services?

If you would like to have a chat to us about prototyping or any other aspect of the web design process please call us on 1800 981 441.