Todd Zaki Warfel’s wireframing process.

Will Evans’s wireframing process

As an interaction designer I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of wireframes and the amount of thought that goes into them. They are not the final product but a means or a process to get there. Websites like I ♥ wireframes or Wireframes Magazine provide plenty of great examples of what can be done.

There isn’t one best practice for producing wireframes. It seems the process can range from drawing sketches on paper to complex vector drawings using tools such as OmniGraffle.

A critical aspect of the wireframe is being able to explain the functionality of the website. It’s not meant to be a layout guide for designers but a means to focus on what’s best for the user coming to your website. It’s not so important to try and lock down every single aspect of the usability or function, but to reach about 80% of what needs to be there. The process of going through design iterations at the end can finalize the rest.

There could be better processes to reach the end, but so far this is what I’ve experienced.

The Web Standards Project has a list HTML and XHTML structural templates to get your website project started on the right track. The list includes HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, 1.1 templates.

The website is also a great resource for learning web standards. It was started in 1998 to advocate standards and increase accessibility for the web.

Nielsen is a leading web usability consultant who worked at Sun Microsystems (1994 to 1998) to make enterprise software easier to use.

He is also known as the founder for “discount usability engineering” for quick and inexpensive improvements in user interfaces.

Nielsen’s ideas on usability are not without critics, but working in the field of UX you will most certainly run into them.

Jakob Nielsen’s website has a distinct plain look to it with only text and search bar at the top. Nielsen gives reason as to why there is only text and almost no graphics on Use It.com.

• WordPress Classic 1.5 by Dave Shea
• WordPress Default 1.6 by Michael Heilemann (based on the famous Kubrick)

These basic themes are great for testing and checking to see if your installation is up and running, but there are so many wonderful themes out there to try.

At WordPress.org you can find over a thousand WordPress themes to start your blog on the right track.

Themeforest is another website with many inexpensive wordpress themes to purchase  and download. Their themes are divided into different categories depending on the type of focus you want for your blog. The types of themes range from magazine to entertainment.

A great theme can add a lot of character to your blog but the key thing is to focus on content. After all content will the reason anybody would choose to visit your blog in the first place.

Ask yourself why would you bother to visit certain websites more often than others and why do you leave others right away when visiting?