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When you think about building a new website, a whole bunch of thoughts can cross your mind. Functionality, color, layout, typography, web design, web development... did we miss anything? It's easy to get overwhelmed with all of these moving pieces.

Without a solid foundation to build on, your website planning will soon fall apart. The time to spend the most energy and resouces is on brainstorming, charting your plans, and assigning tasks. 

In this post, we go over a few best practices to get out all of your ideas for your new website in a clear and organized fashion. We look back at our years of experience with web development to provide you hard-earned advice.

By the end, you'll be equipped with some helpful ways to brainstorm and plan out your new website. Let's dive into the details!

Divergent Thinking: The "Blue-Sky" Approach

Whiteboard Session

This type of brainstorming might remind you of your days as a young student. We, of course, are talking about the whiteboard. In our experience, web developers often like to write out their ideas using a whiteboard. This process helps web teams work through their ideas in a clear and logical method. They shouldn't be alone, though. Be sure to have your marketing team at your brainstorming sessions, too.

Start with your marketing team writing down key aspects of the experience that they want users to have on the new website, such as look, feel, color, and functionality. Then, the web developers can jot down their thoughts on user experience and the user interface that would match up best with the marketing team's needs. Keep in mind web design trends thare are shaping your industry.

Sticky Notes

A sticky note captures a quick thought or idea. The beauty of using Stick Notes to brainstorm is that they are easy to move around. One best practice is to have your team do a "mind dump", a short 3-5 minute period where they write all their ideas down on to notes.

After the individual work, your team can come back together. Listen to each other's ideas and get rid of duplicates. You'll likely see ideas that garner the most collective support that can be grouped. Our recommended strategy is to collect ideas by three main categories: functionality (what the website should do), appearance (how the website should look), and user experience (how a user should experience the website).

Collaborative Software

If you're more digitally-inclined, try looking into software that's made for team brainstorming. Two popular options are MindMap and Evernote. MindMapis a free plugin on Google Chrome. Workers love this tool because it lets them collect and organize their ideas, whether images, text or video. By tying into Google Drive, your work is automatically saved to the cloud.

Evernote has a few different pricing options, with the starting package being free. This software lets you create shared notebooks that can easily share notes and other documents between your team members. The app works smoothly across your desktop, laptop, and mobile devices!

How to Accelerate Your Website Planning

During your website planning, you can brainstorm using a physical whiteboard or virtual tools. When it's time to solidify your website plans, make use of a Gantt chart, burn down chart, or project management software. These methods let you detail your tasks, how long they should take, and who has responsibility to complete them. 

We're approaching nearly a decade working for a variety of clients, from Fortune 500 companies to local, small businesses. Our proven experience can speed up your website planning and development timeline. Learn how we approach website projects from the ground up in our comprehensive B2B website redesign guide.

How do you plan on brainstorming for your new website? Share your insights below and we'll get back to you!

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