The best way to expedite any part of your web design is to avoid having to start over. While trial and error is always necessary in the creative process, its always best to run into the “error” early on in the process. This means taking the means necessary to provide clients with visuals that are relatively accurate to the final design.

Wireframes are a great way to do this. Artists and designers inherently understand the way things “might” look, even if our sketches are just lines and boxes. This is not always the case for clients, so it’s our responsibility to allow them to truly understand what their product will look like. Wireframes are a great way to do this. Sketch away in your typical brainstorming process, but once you’ve narrowed it down to the options you’d like to show the client, use a program such as Balsamiq, to give them a little more structure and context. Here you can add labels, import actual photos, add headings and filler text—and suddenly what used to be a few pen marks on a page is a complete blueprint.

Not only does this allow you as a designer to see how things fit together on a correct scale, (therefore avoiding the unfortunate pitfalls of resizing and rearranging later), but also reduces the chances that a client will not like the format, layout, or flow of the final design. They are able to see all of this early on in the process, so if there are issues with layout, they can accurately visualize these issues and can voice them early on in the process—before you’ve put hours of work into creating final mocks.