Creating Research-Based Web Sites with Netscape Composer

A storyboard serves as a paper version of your web site.  The advantage of doing this on paper is that it lets you see how the site might work in real life with real users.  Once you have the pages sketched out, you can let others look at it and help evaluate the organization of your site’s content.  For example, have someone look at your storyboard (preferably, someone from the group you identified as an audience for your site), then ask them questions, like “what link would you click first?”  or “What link would you click to get to the bibliography?”  Then, watch what the user does – do they have problems navigating to important information?  Once they get to the important information, do they know how to get back?  This information is invaluable at this point in because it is easy to erase a button or add a link on paper to fix problems that might be discovered.

To help you storyboard, we have created a form.  Simply print out a form for each page of your site and draw out the components of the page.  Most pages need a title, some sort of text that explains what the page is, and navigation to the rest of the site.  You also want to include contact information somewhere on the page, as well as a date that the page was last edited.  If you have images on the page, you can indicate where they should be located.  The notes area is a good place to put an info that is important about a specific page.

Here is an example of a page that has been sketched out on the storyboard form: