When you have a new idea for a large website project or for large client websites it’s not unusual to feel a bit overwhelmed by the scope and pieces the project requires. It can be frustrating trying to work on a concept design or talk to a client about how the site will work, how each page is connected to another or what each feature will require to make it work. How do you deal with this?

Some people like to use Sitemaps to organize the flow of web pages, this works well but can be limited as it doesn’t show the aspects of each piece of those pages. For instance I may have a simple contact page with a form, at some point there needs to be a decision as to what fields are on that form, this is where sitemaps begin to fall apart. This is why I use Mindjet MindManager a great mind map creator.

“A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.” – Wikipedia

For every major project I open up MindManager and start organizing my thoughts into a structured diagram. With a mind map you start with a single “node” of which all other sub-nodes are based around. Lets say we want to make a website which is about Automobiles. In this first single node you would type in Automobiles. With mind maps it allows you to start general and work your way out to very specific which helps prevent you from ever feeling overwhelmed. Start general and then narrow down.

Your first Node

Now lets start working on our second layer of nodes:

As you can see we have begun to break down different areas of our site into slightly more specific but yet still quite general. From this diagram we can see that our site will have different Manufacturers of automobiles, automobiles have different options available, the site will have a list of features the user will be able to use and our site will need some sort of navigation system. It’s important to note that I tend to keep Site related items on the left and “object” related items on the right (at least at the start).

Now lets dig into our 3rd layer:

Our third layer again continues the narrowing down of our thoughts into structured organized layout. Now we can see that there are many manufacturers of automobiles (Ford, GM, Toyota, etc). We may want to make a specific page on our site for each one of those, or at the very least we know what companies we need to research for inclusion on our site.

All vehicles come with different options, colors, year, class, etc. Each with a broad set of sub-sections which we will mention on our next image.

Some features or functionality our site will have are a contact form, the ability for users to link to a page on their favorite social networking site, and a way to compare two or more vehicles with each other.

Lastly our Navigation system breaks into our primary navigation (navigation that is always visible to our users) and Sub navigation (which in this case will be if a user is logged in).

Again we have broken each level down into more and more specific information. We could continue to break down each node we could add additional nodes wherever we need to, if we forgot an important section we can just add it in where it’s needed. The software is very flexible and allows you to embed links, images and other items, plus it allows you to create boundaries (borders) around certain groups of nodes to help make them standout or even add “note bubbles” to a specific node to add a brief description on something if it’s not clear.

Feel free to experiment on how you lay things out, it’s very flexible and allows you to sub-divide and structure your layout basically anyway way you wish. So if you are feeling overwhelmed by a large project, just sit down and create a mind map to help organize your thoughts, it will do wonders for your ease of mind.

In the tech world today Google is a hot topic, it seems as if everything Google does creates a storm of positive reviews, articles, tweets and more. Google has become the ‘savior’ from all things Microsoft, people who hate Microsoft have moved over to Google because they think they are dealing with a company that is less “evil”.

Interestingly enough, this is the same type of situation that happened when Microsoft started to grow by leaps and bounds in the late 80’s and early 90’s. What’s the difference? At that time it was IBM who was the evil one, Microsoft came along and people flocked to their software and services because it was a new and provided cutting edge software and most of all it wasn’t evil like IBM.

What are some of the primary reasons people started to hate Microsoft?

• Market share – Microsoft controlled virtually every market that it entered
• Security – Microsoft got hurt big time by the massive number of virus attacks and malware infecting millions of peoples computers.
• Arrogance – With comments like Steve Ballmer’s about the iPhone having no chance at success.
• Control – Microsoft was able to grow and continues to grow rapidly by simply buying out the competition.

How many of the points above are we starting to see creep into Google’s basket. I’d say all of them and frankly Apple is going in the same direction as well.

Google dominates search it has continued to maintain a strong market share over every other competitor without a blink of an eye. Even big name companies like Microsoft have not been able to gain strong momentum even with their new Bing search engine. Search is the strongest service that Google provides and dominates in, but they are trying hard and really just starting to enter new markets with Android, Chrome OS, Chrome, etc. Each of which could begin to really prosper in an environment like we have today where people are ready for something new.

Security is certainly extremely important to almost all companies, including Google. With the latest comments by Google’s Eric Schmidt about privacy, makes many wonder how important security really is to Google. Android is just now starting to get some traction and Chrome OS and Chrome are in development, when these 3 systems are popular what kind of security issues are going to begin to arise? Microsoft learned the hard way and now have solid and intense security tests it runs, does Google spend the same amount of time testing security?

Arrogance is probably the one reason I don’t have a specific example for in regards to Google but I’m sure it’s there.

Control is very important to Google, almost all of Google’s primary services require that you have a Gmail account to access additional functionality. Every page you visit in Chrome gets reported back to Google (from my understanding anyway) which allows Google to better understand your habits whether this is good or bad is up to you. Google single handily has access basically ALL of the information on the internet and now even emails, phones, discussion, photos and now documents. With Chrome OS they want to control everything about you, on their servers on the cloud, scary.

As Google continues to create new services and offer them for free, it will begin to step on the toes of those who may be big supporters of Google which will lead to some un-happy people. Just look at what was released today, a new url-shortener by Google. I can’t imagine any of the other url shortening companies are very happy about this, how many people did Google just piss off by creating one little service. Or how about their new iPhone navigation system that places like TomTom have been trying to control or at least make money from, Google in one swoop crushed an entire industry. How many people did that piss off?

This very thing is what is eventually going to hurt Google, just as how it hurt Microsoft and before that IBM. The bigger you are the more markets you can enter, the more markets you control the more people you tick off, eventually this will catch up to them and their reputation will change for the worse. Despite their “do no evil” slogan, as a major company which influences many markets they are guaranteed to do some kind of evil whether they believe it is evil or not. Ask TomTom if Google did evil with their new navigation system, I’d bet they wouldn’t have to many positive things to say.