Before you start construction on your Web site, there are many steps to be taken. First you must have the storyboard, or the blueprint of your site, developed. In Web development, the majority of the time should be spent in the planning stage—integrate your objectives, your target market information, the findings of the competitive analysis, and your own ideas, as well as those of others. This is done through the process of storyboarding.
The storyboard is the foundation of your Web site. Consider it the plan or blueprint of your site. It should show you, on paper, the first draft of the content and layout of your site. It gives you the chance to review the layout and make changes before development begins.
The storyboard can be created with a software program like Microsoft Visio, with sheets of paper, or with any other mechanism. (See Figure1.1 for an example of a storyboard we developed for one of our hotel clients.) Quite often when we begin storyboarding a project for a client, we’ll start with yellow sticky notes on a wall. Very low tech, but it works! It is very easy to get a visual of the navigation structure and easy to fill in the content pages (one per sticky note) in the appropriate places. It is also very easy to edit—simply move a sticky from one section to another, or add another sticky note for a new page.