Storyboards

Storyboards

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Multimedia authoring means composing documents formatted for interactive presentation in more than one medium. To develop good multimedia product, the storyboard is a basic requirement. It is similar to the outline we use when composing a written work. All of use write documents of some kind, but all of us do such work differently; that is, all of us have different organisational strategies.

You will find the same to be true for organising your website. You will all find your own way to conceptualise, plan, and track your work. However, I will present one strategy (the storyboard) here so that you can examine the basic requirements you should attend to in your project.

You might plan and organise your website in several ways other than a storyboard: you might, for example, simply organise your site by means of pieces of paper; that is, you might write and draw on one piece of paper for each page of your website, indicating on each page, contents, images, format, links, document properties and other relevant information. The disadvantage of this method of organisation is that it does not always make clear how pages are linked one to another. What you end up with is a detailed picture of each page but no clear sense of how a visitor might move from one page to another.

You may, on the other hand, build a flowchart, by means of which you foreground the links among the pages in your website, but containing all the information each page will contain within the limited boxes of a flowchart might be too difficult.

Probably the most effective way of organising a storyboard is to combine the "pieces of paper" approach with the flowchart approach. If you do, you will find yourself constructing a storyboard.

Here are the elements you will need to prepare for before you begin:

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