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.
