The Horse and Buggy Days
Posted On: 2007-09-10
When the urge to design a new website strikes what is the first thing you do? Do you rush for the keyboard and hit the shortcut that will open your HTML editor or dive into a folder of images to look for the special ones that you want to use for the project?
Perhaps you sit back and juggle page and site elements in your brain and map out where you want to go with the site in your head before hitting the keyboard. Whether you jump in straight away or spend a little time thinking about it if you're like most Webmasters out there you're soon heading for the high-tech tools that you have at your disposal because you want to make a start on the project and you want to do it NOW!
But there are some Webmasters out there who reach for the high-tech solutions as a last resort. Before they even think of hitting the keyboard they reach for a design tool that was popular way back in the horse and buggy days and by doing that they're saving themselves a lot of time and a lot of money.
Jason Beaird in his Sitepoint book The Principles of Beautiful Web Design is quite happy to admit that the first thing he reaches for when he is about to start a new website for a client is a pencil and a piece of paper. He uses those simple tools to block out the elements that he wants to include in the design of each page and only when he is happy with the preliminary sketches does he even think of sitting down in front of his computer.
I've begun to try that with some of my designs and, like Jason Beaird, I've found that it is a real time-saver. Instead of fiddling around trying different elements in different places on the page using Photoshop and Dreamweaver and then starting all over again because the design just didn't work I do the basic fiddling with a pencil and the elements just seem to fall into place.
At the same time Steve is using the pencil and paper method to map out the navigation system that needs to be incorporated in some of the complex sites that we've been working on lately and he's been impressed too. In the past he was one of those who would juggle the navigation elements in his head and all too often would find, well into a project, that he had a couple of orphaned pages with no way to link to them without a major rebuild of the navigation.
With pencil and paper he can map out the navigation and ensure that it not only works but also includes all the pages on the site. For him that's a saving in time and frustration. And it's probably a saving on his desk too because he doesn't spend so much time banging his head on the desk anymore.
Now you may be thinking that with the simple free site and gallery designs that Webmasters use in this industry there's no need to step back to the pencil and paper days but if you're new to this industry then those tools can be invaluable to you. You'll find that you won't miss including important elements and it will be easier to plot where you want those elements to appear.
Even for those who aren't so new the pencil and paper design stage can be important if you're working up some new templates. And if you're working on developing an empire of sites that will kick you to the top of the search engines then these simple tools are vital.
Once you step out into something more than just free site and gallery building you'll find the pencil and paper idea can be a big help as you use them to map out more complex sites. And of course if you're trying to build a network of sites that you can use to your advantage to rank well in the search engines then a pencil and lots of pieces of paper can be vital if you want to keep track of what you've got and what they're all linked too.
Of course there is a slightly more advanced tool that you can use if you really can't bring yourself to go back to pencil and paper. You could always use a whiteboard and I know of several Webmasters who do very well search engine marketing who have used white boards in the past. But there must come a time when your empire just won't fit on a whiteboard and eventually your office won't be able to accommodate all the whiteboards that you might need.
If you've ever read any of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series you'll remember that the Foundation guys wrote their mathematical plan and predictions across the interior walls of a building that grew bigger and bigger to accommodate the plan. I suppose we could always do that but their plan was linear while site designs and website empires are not. The Foundation guys didn't have to put up with irate partners and landlords who don't like to see their walls decorated with the odd scribbles of a Webmaster either.
So perhaps you really do need to step back into the 'good old days' and find that pencil that you once saw in the bottom of a draw in the kitchen. Once you've found it then it's time to start applying it to some paper. When you do you too may be surprised at how much time it saves.
And of course time is money so if the pencil and paper save you time then, even though they've been around for centuries and are definitely old-tech, they're going to save you money too.