Storyboards, Your Visual Blueprint

Use a storyboard to illustrate the overall design concept and keep everyone moving in the same direction.

Storyboarding provides an overall rough outline of what the presentation will look like, including which topics go where, the links, and a conceptual idea of where your images go, what the layout will look like and so on. With that representation in hand, you can develop each page in turn without trying to remember exactly where that page fits into the overall scheme and it's often complex relationships.

You don't have to be able to draw to produce a storyboard. You need only sketch in the outlines. 'This image goes in the top right hand corner, this heading is level 2 and centred, this paragraph goes here' etc. You can draw all this in simple shapes with a few notes. 'This page is a white background, the navigation links go here and point to' and so on. You may even want to name the files you need for each page so you know which image or piece of text goes where. You may need to provide examples of things like house style for copy and image style and size for graphics to go with the storyboard.

Ideally, someone should be able to look at your storyboard, no matter how crude, and using the right material, put together the same site you would have done. If you have a large site to develop this can be very useful, allowing you to farm out work to others. From the storyboard they should be able to layout the pages as you want them. When you assemble the project you should have consistently designed pages despite having several different authors.

There is nothing more frustrating when working in a group than finding that everyone has been working on completely different web sites! This is much more common than you might think. The style of writing can vary considerably from one writer to another, images and icons can be utterly different in look and feel and in different places on the page and so on.

Use the storyboard to illustrate the overall design concept, the house style, the layout, the size and look of images so that all members of the team are pulling in the same direction. The storyboard is useful for illustrating the concepts behind the site to other members of your company. You might want to use it in a presentation to the MD for example.