Well I’ve got my own project now. From scratch. Very excited and already a few days in, I am quite precious about it.

The first task was to deliver a site map. Easy peasy you say.

I’ll be honest, I thought that a while back but a while back, I’d never really had to do one as such or at least not a complicated one.

I’m not a content kind of guy in as much that I’m not a great writer of content or know really where a lot of it will sit. Or so I thought. I think it’s probably because I’ve never proper dedicated time to it before.

Now, here I am prioritising content, seeing where it should sit and what the final menu system should be. Obviously some sites will be more complicated than others.

The thing I took more from the exercise is that things don’t get decided straight away. I had a few versions by the end of it, all pretty similar but just enough change to be different. I started to get brutal with content and where it should sit to the point where I was happy with the flow.

I’ve since been back in after doing wireframing and changed it again as the flow was just off a bit.

Now I have a menu that I think is just right. It didn’t happen overnight.

Aside from the site map, I wanted to touch on Axure. I’ve been using it a few weeks now and I have to say it’s brilliant. I’m finding it much quicker to use this than knock up a HTML wireframe/prototype. I’ll hold my hands up and say I never wanted to use it and was keen to try and implement HTML much quicker but now I have to be honest, I’d probably go the Axure way.

It’s still clunky at times and a few issues I’d like to see fixed but it does produce decent high fidelity wireframes as well as low.

I’ve realised that I’ve not written any HTML in a month now or at least nothing of interest. Do I miss it? At the moment, I have to say no.

This will probably be the last update I do like this as I’m sure I’ve covered off enough of what I’ve learnt and people will be reading them less. I’ll still be talking about UX but not weekly unless something mega important happens.

Cheers all