How to get what you want with a website storyboard

Whether you do it yourself or call in the professionals, your webpage and the experience it offers your audience is only as good as the vision you have. There are hundreds of templates out there, but none of them are customised to your product or service – not yet at least. Before you begin setting up your website you need to know what you want. Building a website storyboard is the best way to do this.
Map Out Your Webpage Before You Build
Making sure your webpage is easy to navigate and informative can be difficult enough, but that’s only part of the story. Every visitor who lands on your page is beginning a journey, both with the page and your company. It goes without saying that creating a great first impression is essential. However, you also need to be able to metaphorically hold your new visitor’s hand and to guide them through the site. This way you can take them where they need to go and tell them what they need to know. You also need to do this from day one. Once a customer has had one negative experience with a website, they will avoid visiting it again. With websites, first impressions can be only impressions.
Knowing Your Preferred Customer Journey
Storyboarding is the term we use for illustrating journeys, whether they are film stories or customer experience stories. This allows us to see what information goes where. Every story element has the right location and in webpages, this is largely concerned with flow. To do this, you’ll need to know a little about who your customer is and what they might be looking for. What is your unique selling point? Is it your convenient city centre location or your famous clients? Knowing what brings your visitors in is how you know where to start.
Brainstorm Ideas
It’s difficult to know what to include and sometimes the most essential information is so instinctive that it slips through the net. Try using a bubble diagram to think about the customer journey through the page. That way, you’ll avoid overlooking important elements.
How to Create the Storyboard That Will Build Your Webpage
Firstly, collect together all the text and images that you consider essential and sort them into topics. As a general rule, the largest menu is the first menu the visitor will visit, but the menus also need to be hierarchical. For example, a hairdressing salon chain would offer location first, followed by services available.
Your next step is to find your connections. If you think several pages relate to one another, make sure they are linkable without the visitor having to backtrack. This will create linear, hierarchal or a branch design connections in the menus. Now you need to create a standardised page. This is the prevailing look for all your pages. The visitor doesn’t want to have to search each newly opened page for information. Also remember that most people are right handed, so making your page right-centric will always make it more appealing to the greatest number of users.