Storyboards
Storyboards represent the organization and layout of your website. The most important part of designing a website is the organization. Storyboards are an easy way to visualize the organization of a site and the priorities of the information contained within.
This aids in making your site easier to navigate for your visitors.
Things to Consider
- Brainstorm: While many clients immediately want to see what their Web sites will look like, jumping over the crucial planning and organization stage of site development can cause problems down the road. It can be somewhat difficult to convey to the client that this stage is key for a site's success.
- Hierarchy: If you decide against the "we must have everything on the first page" scenario, think about how to organize the content. This is especially important for smaller sites that may launch with a fairly limited amount of content online. Designing without consideration of what the site will look like six months or a year down the line can lead to an unintended complete redesign instead of integration into the existing site. Group similar information into sections that will be easily understood by the user.
- Navigation: Lateral navigation through the site at some level will reduce user frustration if users don't have to travel through the home page each time to reach a different piece of content. While it's impossible to have everything in the navigation, key signposts to different sections will help. Additionally a search function will aid people who are actually looking for a specific piece of information rather than browsing. A number of companies, Excite among them, offer a search mechanism that can be easily incorporated into most sites.
- Balance: Don't lose site of the depth of information.
Key information, that which a user is most likely to be searching for, should
remain somewhere on or near the top level to ensure that the user is able
to find it with reasonable ease.
An Example Storyboard
