the mindmap/preliminary site plan
Once you decide upon the content of your site it is time to become more specific and also to start putting your material in some sort of a hierarchical order. A very good way of doing this is through mindmaps.
Now, you can conceivably draw a mindmap on a piece of paper or a whiteboard. The thing with analog means is that they do not allow for too many changes of mind - every time you want to make a change you have to painstakingly erase things and start all over since obviously there is no such thing as copy paste in the physical world. A website is a living, dynamic thing, subject to many changes as you progress, and so it is a good idea to use a software for this. Freemind is opensourced and fantastic.
The screenshot above is a preliminary site plan for this site and I have put it here to show you how Freemind basically works. Insert gives you a child node and enter gives you a sibling node. You can write as much or as little explanatory text into the nodes. You can link nodes up with arrows and also cluster nodes through clouds. And there is even more that you can do with this, such as that you can add images and hyperlinks also.
Now, you can conceivably draw a mindmap on a piece of paper or a whiteboard. The thing with analog means is that they do not allow for too many changes of mind - every time you want to make a change you have to painstakingly erase things and start all over since obviously there is no such thing as copy paste in the physical world. A website is a living, dynamic thing, subject to many changes as you progress, and so it is a good idea to use a software for this. Freemind is opensourced and fantastic.
The screenshot above is a preliminary site plan for this site and I have put it here to show you how Freemind basically works. Insert gives you a child node and enter gives you a sibling node. You can write as much or as little explanatory text into the nodes. You can link nodes up with arrows and also cluster nodes through clouds. And there is even more that you can do with this, such as that you can add images and hyperlinks also.
So, next step: Download Freemind now and start putting together a preliminary site plan for your site.
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