Daydreams and Brainstorms

Being a full time mom to an active toddler, I don't have a lot of time at the computer. But I find myself with a lot of thinking time during the day when driving place to place or watching my son at the park or any of the zillion other things that keeps me from the computer but doesn't take much thought.

Because of this, I tend to do a lot of site design in my head. There's pros and cons with this. One big pro is that I think through what I want and often realize something isn't going to work before I actually implement it. The big con is that it's hard to keep a whole site in my head and I'm sure I've forgotten lots of ideas I had. But, until my son is old enough that I can spend more time on the computer, it's what I have to work with.

He's doing a good job of playing by himself at the moment, so I'm going to write down as many of my daydreams and brainstorms as I can until he comes to fetch me. This will be messy, but I can always refine it later. :)

• Full featured forums with all the usual community goodies.
• Public and private forums
• Community participation with commenting and voting on nodes
• A listing of every park with photos and other info.
• A listing for every business in the area so people can easily do local searches.
• All items tagged by location and age appropriateness.
• Google maps integrated for all locations
• A section with information about each community.
• Gallery for local photos
• RSS feeds for local news
• Polls
• Blogs
• Photo gallery per user
• Customized profile page
• Classifieds where members can list items
• Communtiy event calendar with reminder ability
• A few ads to help support the site but not tons of them that get in the way of content.
• General theme thoughts: brown gradient gutter. White background for main site. Vibrant colour for boxes. Local photos in header... maybe a slide show.
• Front page - Recent content, upcoming events, latest photos
• Menu - Main navigation to forums, etc plus a menu block that has the same options but links are filtered by the currently selected community

That's a good start to work with. I'm sure I'll think of more goodies to add as I go along but at least I got a lot of the ideas in my head written down in shorthand so I'll remember them.

The next step is organizing and focusing my brainstorm into concrete specs.