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Blueprints

According to Rosenfeld and Morville (2002), 

blueprints

:

Show the relationships between pages and other content components, and can be used 

to portray organization, navigation and labelling systems.

They are often thought of, and referred to, as site maps or site structure diagrams and have 

much in common with these, except that they are used as a design device clearly showing 

grouping of information and linkages between pages, rather than a page on the website to 

assist navigation.

Refer to Figure 11.16 for an example of a site structure diagram for a toy manufacturer 

website which shows the groupings of content and an indication of the process of task com-

pletion also.

Wireframes

A related technique to blueprints is 

wireframes

, which are used by web designers to indicate 

the eventual layout of a web page. Figure 11.17 shows that the wireframe is so called because 

it just consists of an outline of the page with the ‘wires’ of content separating different areas 

of content or navigation shown by white space.