When it comes to planning out a brand new web site, organizing your thoughts can be rather difficult.  You might know that you want to design a web site about a specific topic, but can’t decide what else you might need in that web site to help it become successful.  Mind maps are one great way to get your jumbled thoughts about your site organized.

What is a Mind Map? A mind map (or the process of mind mapping) is when you create a diagram using specific words, ideas or tasks and arrange them around a central theme or idea.  By doing this, you can visualize, structure and classify ideas based around your central theme.

For an example, take a look at this mind map of my breakfast:

The centralized idea here is what I had for breakfast.  You can see I had a slice of toast,a bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice. To take it a step further, we could branch out even further with the idea of toast, like so:

What made up the toast? Well, it was a toasted slice of bread, with butter on it.  So off the idea of toast, I listed bread and butter.  See how easy taking one idea like breakfast and coming up with ways to visualize how it came to be?

How to Mind Map Your Site! Now that you are familiar with what a mind map is and how to use it, it is time to look at web site organization. You just got a Basic hosting plan from Lunarpages, and you want to start up a web site about super heroes.  So with the super heroes topic, how could you divide it up?  How about you split it into two for now, DC Comics and Marvel Comics – the two biggest comic book brands.

Now you have at least two pages planned out.  Under DC Comics, you could list heroes like the Green Lantern, Batman and Superman because they all come from the DC Comics brand.  For Marvel Comics, you could list super heroes like Spiderman, Iron Man, and Wolverine.

So that should be a good start as far as content goes.  So what other specific pages does a web site need?  What about a page that tells about the web site?  Maybe, you could add a page with your contact information too.

See how organizing ideas in a mind map is helpful when it comes to organizing your web site?  Much like a tree, you start at the trunk, and then break your web site into branches, and then those branches have branches, and then those branches have leaves.

What Tools and Software Can You Use for Mind Maps? Ok, so you know what to do and how to do it, now you’re probably just needing a way to get it done.  You really don’t need anything too fancy to get this accomplished.  For years, I just used notebook paper and pencil to sketch out my ideas into a mind map.  There are some online solutions as well as software solutions you might want to check out to bring mind mapping into the digital age.

Bubbl.us is what I have been using for my screenshots above.  It is an online tool that lets you drag and drop your ideas around on the mind map a very simple task.  It might be a little confusing at first, but hover over anything you have a question about and you can get more information about it in the help pane in the browser.  Wikipedia also has a long list of mind mapping software solutions worth checking into.

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