This project was pending for a long time and it definitely was an interesting one. For a long time our product website was not performing very well and we were losing probable clientele at regular intervals. We then went through our analytics and found out that our website was taking too much time to load at first and that why visitors were dropping off.
The reason for this low performance was excessive use of wordpress plugins and using a heavy theme. The content displayed on the website was at large too. All the code inside had messed up. If you try to remove one plugin it would end up crashing a page somewhere. We had done all sorts of optimisation and we had a reached a dead end. The only way out was a complete overhaul. Then we decided that if we are doing things ground up then we might as well do a complete new information architecture and redesign the structure.
Now this exercise to overhaul everything, the IA, UX, UI and then coding it up was going to take some good time. So to prevent our visitors from dropping off we decided to create an HTML version of the entire website excluding the blog and host it until we get new one fresh out go the oven. I had taken this responsibility to make one in HTML from scratch and we accomplished it in a fairly good amount of time. We ended up loading our new HTML static website in around 3 secs compared to the earlier wordpress version which used to take roughly 10~15 secs.
Features are meaningless. They mean nothing to the users. A coherant product user interface is the product to the users.
So the above exercise is still in progress and I’ll update the status and do’s and don’ts soon. For wire framing we extensively use Adobe XD. It actually wires your designs and previews it as if you are surfing a normal website. The tool is very trivial to use and anyone can figure out just by looking at their interface. They also allow you to share a live preview of your wires over the cloud to others externally and then they can give you feedback on each of the wires individually. First we used to use sketch with marvelapp to get the same result but we found this one faster. Anyway sketch has now come up with prototyping in their version 49 but they are still improving, no comments feature though!