Brainstorming a Website

By defining goals for your website you’ve given your thoughts a bit of structure to them, now its time to let them run wild. Goals help to scope what you’re wanting to accomplish, brainstorming helps to determine methods for accomplishing them.  The great thing about brainstorming is that there isn’t a wrong way to do it. For me I just write down all the questions or ideas that I might have. I tried to consolidate them into my notebook but I know I’ve got several scraps of paper with different rough idea on them.

Brainstorming isn’t restricted to a hard ending point like some of the other steps in the website design process is. Take a few days to write down ideas, then move onto the next step, but don’t stop brainstorming. As you advance close to a finished product new ideas will enter your head. Never stop brainstorming, but learn where to draw the line when it comes to building. Not every good idea needs to make the initial release. For my personally type, this is where I struggle the most. I want to put it all in and not show it to anyone until it is completely finished and perfect. To quote one of my new favorite quotes that I read in the Huffington Complete Post Guide to Blogging,

Perfect is the enemy of done.

This is a post in my Building a Website Series and Case Study. This is the third post explaining How to Develop a Website Strategy.

Brainstorming for My Site

Here are a few things I brainstormed:

• Big Content Items
• Balancing the content to appeal to multiple visitor types
• Community – Obviously important for a local website, but how and where do I want my community to grow.

And here are some of the solutions I came up with from my brainstorming:

Big Content Items

This is just a quick list of content that I want on the site. Most of the stuff are main navigation tab type things like, Info, News, Events, etc. but some are more subdomain type things like a job board and a forum. The content of the site gets further vetted in the Information Architecture and Content Strategy phase of website development, but it is important to get them down now to get the creative juices flowing in the right direction.

One big decision I made concerning my site content was that I didn’t want to be considered a news website. Trying to keep up with all the news that happens even on just the county level would have been more than I would have been able to manage and still have time to grow the site in other areas. Being considered as a news website might also have detracted from the deeper content that I want people to know my site for as well. The most important reason why I didn’t want to have so much news was that news isn’t something I personally wanted to write about. Why would I build something in my spare time that required me to something I didn’t want to do? So I came to the conclusion that I was only going to publish news stories if it were something that might be useful for more than two weeks. So things like ‘crash on I-85′ and ‘Schools closed today due to weather’ wouldn’t be published on the site, but things like ‘New County Commissioner’ would be.

Balancing Site for Visitors

I thought about the word ‘balance’ and how I didn’t want my site to sway too heavily towards a certain visitor type. While a local community website will obvious mainly appeal to people living in the local area, I also wanted to be sure to provide content for people who weren’t local residents. For people living within the community, I wanted to balance the content between the casual browsing types and local business owners types. As I get around to the wireframing stage you’ll see this concept take more effect and *spoiler alert* I focused too much on this and had to make some corrective action to design something that made more sense.

Community

Another thing I really put some thought into was the ‘community’ aspect I wanted to build. Community is going to be a large part of this site’s success, but I had to play around with different ideas of how I wanted to build my community and where I wanted my community to reside on the web. Did I want people contributing to my site via comments, reviews or article uploading? Do I want people coming to my domain to chat or do I leverage existing social networks?

I decided that I wanted to keep all of the community side of my website on the social networks like Twitter and Facebook for a few reasons. As I mentioned in the Personal Goals article, I believe it’s important that even if your website isn’t a success financially you should still be able to feel like you accomplished something because you’ve learned something new. I wanted to really learn how to use Twitter and Facebook to craft a community. I’ve been using both networks for years, but they were just for abstract thoughts and ideas. Never have I had any real focus or desires to build up my networks and attract people to follow me.

I also decided that I didn’t want to have any user contributed content on my site such as comments or reviews. I decided this because I wanted to keep my focus on community relegated to the social networks and because I wanted my site to be a living portfolio of my work. I like knowing that I personally wrote, or supervised the writing, for all the content on my site. Plus, the blogosphere commenting scheme has really lost its savor. This personal blog has a comment ratio of 1:10 of comments from real people vs. a robot trying to get a link with some generic ‘I think the article content you writed(sic) is really great’ comment. I’m better off leveraging the tools designed to build communities.

Takeaway Thoughts about Brainstorming a Website

Keep your notebook handy and come up with new ideas everywhere you go. Inspiration can come from anywhere and there is no bad idea at this stage. Write it down and continue to mull it over for the next few days. You don’t need a ‘top 10 best ways to brainstorm’ post to show you how to get started, just start asking yourself questions about your website project and write down the question. When you’ve felt that you’ve asked enough questioned and determined enough answers, you should begin to see your website in your mind’s eye. It might not have a color scheme or the copy typography, but you can still see it coming together.

Now you’re ready to move on to identifying you target audience.