The Idea
Once you have got the idea for the site you want to create, you will want to write down what it will do from the point of view of the user. This will be a general description, as getting too specific won’t allow for any future changes to the idea that may be required as you move further into the actual development. Remember: No idea is static and there is nothing wrong with making slight alterations as you go along.
Just keep your initial idea in mind because you don’t want to end up halfway through coding, look back on your idea and find that it has changed so much it is entirely different. This is something I have learnt the hard way – by not writing down my idea in the beginning and just keeping it in my head, it morphed completely into something else, causing confusion and ended up in my ‘partially completed projects’ folder. So let us begin by defining the idea that I will be using throughout these articles:
A site that allows users to login and upload a maximum of one photo a day. The user can view their photos, edit descriptions, titles, keywords, and delete them. Visitors to the site can view the photographs and search for photos related to subjects they are interested in, allowing them to up/down vote each one they view.
So now I have a short description of what I expect from my website. As you can see there is nothing in there talking about how I’m going to design, code, or layout anything. All of that will be handled later – it is not important from a user’s point of view and so it is not important for the idea description.
When I showed the above description to my friend, they asked “Only one per day?”. The reason I chose to only allow one upload per user per day is to minimise the chance of the site being spammed with hundreds of similar photos or worse, photos that could be considered controversial and/or illegal, and make it easier to remove any photos that fall into these categories. It is also my hope that if a user is only allowed one photo, they would put more thought into what they choose to upload.
In the next article I’ll be talking more about the idea, but from a developer’s point of view – breaking it down and working out what we need to make it work ready for the coding stage.
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