STORYBOARDING YOUR WEBSITE

 The next step in planning your website is to figure out what content goes on what page and to come up with some simple links for navigation between those pages.

If you’re using one of the structures described in the preceding section, much of the organization might arise from that structure-in which case, this section will be easy. However, if you want to combine different kinds of structures or if you have a lot of content that needs to be lined together in sophisticated ways, sitting down and making a specific plan of what goes where will be incredibly useful later as you develop, and link each individual page.

WHAT’S STORY BOARDING AND WHY DO I NEED IT?

Storyboarding a website is a concept borrowed from filmmaking in which each scene and each individual camera shot is sketched and roughed out in the order in which it occurs in the movie, storyboarding provides an overall structure and plan to the film that enables the director and staff to have a distinct idea of where each individual shot fits into overall movies.

The storyboarding concept works quite well for developing web pages. The storyboard provides an overall rough outline of what the website will look like when it’s done, including which topics go on which pages, the primary links, and maybe even some conceptual idea of what sort of graphics you’ll

Be using and where they’ll go. With than\t representation in hand, you can develop each page without trying to remember exactly where that page fits into the overall website and its often complex relationships to other pages.

In the case of really large sets of documents, a storyboard enables different people to develop various portions of the same website. With a clear storyboard, you can minimize duplication of work and reduce the amount of contextual information each person needs to remember.

For smaller or simpler websites, or websites with; a simple logical structure, storyboarding might be unnecessary. For larger and more complex projects, however the existence of a storyboard can save enormous amounts of time and frustration. If you can’t keep all the parts of your content and their  relationship in your head, consider creating a storyboard.

So, what does a storyboard for a website look like? It can be as simple as a couple of sheets of paper. Each sheet can represent a page, with a list topics each page will describe and some thoughts about the links that page will include. I’ve seen storyboards for very complex hypertext systems that involved a really large bulletin board, index cards had a topic written on it, and the links were represented by string tied on pins from card to card.

The pont of a storyboard is that is organizes your web pages in a way that works for you. If you like index cards and string, work with these tools. If a simple outline on paper or on the computer works better, use that instead.