Brainstorming About the Features and Functionality for Your Website

Brainstorming & Free Association

A useful technique called "free association" can be helpful for getting started on any type of project whether it creative writing assignment or a website development project. Free association, basically an unconstrained form of brainstorming, is a process of generating ideas in which you intentionally allow yourself to consider, or simply write down, every idea that pops into your head, regardless of whether or not it is reasonable or completely outrageous.

The idea is that sometimes you can dream up some really cool stuff if you ignore the "rules of the game", or in the web development world, "technical limitations", and just let your ideas flow freely. Another benefit of free association, in the context of writing, is that you don't have to worry about spelling or grammar, your goal is to crank out lots of ideas no matter how rough the presentation may be.

You can use a similar approach to "dreaming up" your website and the functionality that you want. It's not important, during the brainstorming phase of the project, if you come up with crazy ideas or good ones, although it helps if you actually have a few good ideas mixed in with the nutty or impossible concepts.

You shouldn't let yourself get stuck on trying to pin down specific details such as naming a feature or exactly how it will work and what technology would be used to build it, just write it down and keep the ideas coming. The plan is to get as many ideas down on paper and then start applying some logic and reason to them in the next phase of functional requirements analysis where you prioritize the features.