Idea and Concept for Web Sites

What you can do to begin building your website - with or without us

Write your ideas down!

You have a great idea, you have an important message to customers, to a network, to the public?

Write it down!

  • What the idea is about
  • How you came up with this
  • Why do you think it is important
  • What your message is
  • What you want to achieve by publishing it

Writing this down helps:

  1. To be honest with yourself
  2. Get more ideas of what is important
  3. To communicate your ideas to others
  4. To concentrate on your idea in later steps

1. Great ideas are - great. They usually still need some thought and additional details. Writing down these ideas helps to identify gaps and fill them in. Read your concept after a good night's (or day's) sleep, and you will see where it needs work.  (Try mindmapping, it really helps.)

 2. Getting more ideas of what is important is a small step once you see the gaps. Once you start filling the gaps even more factors which need to be considered will become clear. View your concept from different perspectives, discuss it with friends or business partners and learn from questions and criticism. Modify the core idea only if really necessary, and .... keep writing it down! Mark what you changed, too, otherwise you might discuss aspects again and again.

3. When presenting your ideas to others over and again, most likely you will not tell the same story twice but constantly improving versions. Each time we communicate ideas we get some feedback and progress with our ideas. This way the idea you started out with slowly becomes a concept. The danger is that there are so many things you could do and change and might loose your focus, loose the impact of your idea. If you find a better idea, great. Just write it down! This will always help you remember the value and the core of your original concept.

 4. This 'remember value and the core' of the idea is even more important once you start implementing your idea, your site, your service or product. So much to do, so many ideas, so much feedback and so many distractions. Get your script out once a week and compare it with what you have implemented. Still close?

Now you've got a writen down idea or concept. Time to move on and think about your target groups and their needs.

Take a look at examples of successful, creative solutions:

Mindmapping

A great tool to generate ideas is mind mapping. It is very productive and fast.

It is easy to draw a mindmap on paper and detail it by using different colors, creating illustrations and connections. 

Another method is to start with a brainstorming and then sorting and structuring the ideas in a mindmap, perhaps supported by software.





See wikipedia for more info on mind mapping.

I have worked a extensively with Mindmanager, the integration into the Microsoft Office Suite is phenomenal. 

Freemind is very good, too. While offering very good formating the GUI seems a bit geeky but is very comfortable to use and has a lot of useful features. Free, as far as I know.