OUGD603 - Grainger Market identity - Website inspiration & wireframes

The website should give people a true insight into the market and allow the Grainger Market to enter the digital age. It needed to be current and adequate for target audience yet stripped back and basic so a younger and older visitor can both use it. To gather some influences I looked through contemporary websites on the inspiration site 'Siteinspire'. The site hosts thousands of examples in different web categories such as corporate, editorial, minimal and luxury. From looking at examples it made me consider more about what is necessary to include and ways in which this can be applied for the broad audience.

I approached the wireframe designs for the website with the intention of sketching a number of templates that can be used for numerous pages. This creates a cohesive website but also saves time and effort creating singular designed pages. The wireframes are intended to be a visual guide that represent the skeletal framework of the website. A wireframe depicts the page layout or arrangement of a website’s or apps content, including interface elements and navigational systems, and how they work together. I focused on what the screen does, not what it looks like as this would come along later in the design composition.

My wireframe sketches focus on:

• The range of functions available
• The relative priorities of the information and functions
• The rules for displaying certain kinds of information
• The effect of different scenarios on the display

For the first sketches I only wanted to focus on the home page then I'd select one to further develop digitally, this would act as template for other pages to follow.

I selected a number of sketches to take further and create digitally as I wanted a more clear representation of wireframes, as to this point the sketches gave me guidance on what layout and rules to abide by when designing. 

For the second stage of wireframe development I continued to design home pages as I wanted to keep the process of allowing the design of the homepage influence later pages in the site. Each wireframe is clear and bold, aligning to contemporary web design which is standard at the moment. As I aimed to allow any user to use it, it had to be simple yet engaging so I wanted to include large scale images in the home page of the site along with big titles.