Designing Websites with Wireframes. Does your company use them? If not, what do you use?

This afternoon I ran across “Wireframing and Getting the Most Out of it from a Designer’s Perspective“, by Liz Tran over at Designer Daily. The article illustrates the Pros to utilizing wireframes to design webpages. I’ve designed internal webpages for 3M with provided Visio wireframes, and more recently for Marketing Clique (Online Marketing -> SEO, Website Design, Programming, and more) from a wireframe they provided me to design the webpage at www.cleandude.com. Other than that, I haven’t designed from them.

A former colleague, Edward Spurlock, a self-proclaimed “evolving Code Monkey”, posted a comment on my Graphic Arts Daily Facebook Fan page. He indicated that there may be a better alternative to designing from wireframes. This prompt from Edward led me over to the article link he posted on his blog by Julie Standford of Boxes and Arrows titled, “HTML Wireframes and Prototypes: All Gain and No Pain“.

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I, like Julie, develop prototypes utilizing Dreamweaver. I find it faster and easier than going through the trouble of sketching out the site, then building a wireframe to work off of. However, my recent experience using Marketing Clique’s clean wireframe was very helpful in designing the Clean Dude site. I deduced from that experience that using a wireframe was indeed helpful and there was no mistake as to knowing what layout the client wanted.

I’d love to know what the reader’s of this blog use and does it work well for you or have you been itching to try something faster, better, different?

Comments appreciated!