Creating idea boards

An idea board is a collection of ideas or inspiration that you can use as a reference when creating your site. An idea board is similar to the concept of a mood board in fashion or interior design, but you will use them for more than just inspiration on color and style (mood), and ideally, you should have multiple boards for your website project. You might have one idea board to collect photography inspiration, another for web page layouts that you like, and a different one for collecting websites with great text content.

Online tools such as https://www.pinterest.com/ or https://evernote.com/ allow you to collect things from around the Web and store them in different boards (Pinterest) or notebooks (Evernote). Although Pinterest is the easiest to use, Evernote allows you to store screen grabs with annotations such as arrows or circles, in addition to photos and web links. Either tool will work for your website project idea boards.

The following screenshot example shows a private Pinterest board that was used for planning the http://www.square-help.com/ website:

Your idea boards will be used for the work we'll do in the rest of this book, so it's a good idea to start them now and continue to add to them and edit them as you move through the early stages of your project.