Wireframes

Wireframe - this term may not be new to Interaction designers, Usability practitioners and lately project managers. However very little known to root level engineers (mostly UI developers). Well I wasn't familiar to this myself when I was a developer. But we have been practicing this since the start of our projects. We scribble roughly on paper on how UI of a product is going to look like - mostly layout and navigation. However we don't pay attention to minute details of how user would want to look at the product and navigate through it. It was more from system and implementation point of view. Well many of these things got cleared during my study at IDC.

So I slightly went off the topic. The reason for this post is that I just want to highlight some of the key benefits of wireframes. I was reading an article by Michael on Adobe for using Fireworks to do wireframing and export the design into css and html (that's a great relief for developers).
Following is the link >>
Michael list downs some of the key benefits of Wireframing. An excerpt from his article.

Wireframes help you communicate the fact that your design is a work in progress—and therefore subject to change based on feedback

Wireframes help ensure that the functional design is evaluated separately from the visual design

Wireframes don't become dated like comps, so you can reuse those unchanged dialog box sketches in your version 2.0 functional specifications even though you have completely reskinned the application

You can create wireframes much faster than you can design high-quality graphics—and it doesn't require much artistic skill

Using wireframes instead of comps for initial design reviews helps you to avoid the inevitable "please make the logo bigger" request until the functionality has been decided