Scaled Visio Wireframe Templates & Stencils

Wireframes have been an indispensable tool for information architects to present and communicate the web page layouts and content placement to clients and developers. In revisiting our wireframes templates, I wanted to tackle a couple of issues that have been brought up across the years since I last wrote anything on the matter:

• A common question from clients is, "Where is the fold?"
• A common critique from developers is, "You can't fit 4 columns on a page - you don't have the page width". What this is saying is that the wireframe falsifies scale, with IA's often manipulating font sizes to fit their layout.
• "Is the page showing 800x600 screen resolution or 1024x768?"
• IA's have commented, "The homepage often ends up being longer than other pages, and it's hard to show that in a wireframe template that is not long enough." IA's often end up continuing the page on a second page or worse, compressing the page vertically that may compromise the integrity of the design.
• Unlike "traditional" architects who print blueprints on large format plotters, IA's are limited to the paper sizes in the office or clients can print to - 8 1/2 x 11 page

Taking all these thoughts and comments into consideration, we set out to design a Visio wireframe template and stencil that was more reflective of the true scale on webpages, shows the fold, is long enough for longer pages, and fits on an 8 1/2 x 11 paper. The result was a template whose fonts are small but legible (who really reads "Lorem Ipsums" anyway), with space for notes on the side. You be the judge.

• Visio Wireframe Template / Stencil (Zip | 160k)