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In part I of this series, I talked about using mind maps and spreadsheets as tools to help clarify your thinking about a niche. Here’s part II.

The List of Nouns

Now that you have some of the business/marketing stuff on paper, it’s time to consider the web site (really, its a web application, don’t kid yourself). This is where too many people get tangled up, mostly because everyone has this obsession about functionality.

Let me tell you something right now, people, and please please please listen up. A web site or piece of software isn’t about functionality, not really. It’s about the person using said web site or software to accomplish a goal or activity. Period, end of story, move on.

But you just can’t move on, can’t you? Lots of people talk to me about their ideas for such and such a site and they have these lists of functions. It always make me laugh. Why? Because there’s no better way to shut the door on your dreams than to focus on functions.

Let me give you an example. Had a young man approach me last month about a site he wanted me to build. It had to allow publishing of certain kinds of content with certain kinds of database fields on such and such mobile devices. Most users were contributors who would submit their content via a certain process to a group of editors, each of which would have certain specific tools at their disposal to mark up the content and flow it to a site manager, who would press certain buttons to get content on the site.

My comment to him was, “Why build this application? Why not go with WordPress?” WordPress is free, supports most of what he wanted (in generic ways) and helped his organization achieve its goal: publishing and managing content from a variety of contributors.

No deal. WordPress wasn’t good enough. Oh, but wait, the price tag for something custom was just too much. Another business bites the dust. Grrrr.

Here’s how to avoid this problem. Develop a list of nouns and verbs that describe who your users are (nouns) and what they want to do on the site (verbs). Very simple, very tidy, and expressed in a way that will help you make a really important decision….

Do I build? Do I buy? Or do I buy and then modify? (See, it kinda rhymes: build…buy…modify!)

The list of nouns is plain and simple a list of users. Identify as many users as you can:

• Contributors
• Editors
• Authors
• Supervisors
• Judges
• Moderators

You get the idea. Your list of nouns/users might also be segmented by level of expertise (newbie, intermediate, wizard, demigod) or type of topic (if you have a hiking site, you’ll have recreational hikers, mountain hikers, urban hikers, et cetera).

Once you have a list of nouns, you’re ready for ze verbs.

List of Verbs

If your list of nouns is all about users, then your list of verbs is all about actions and behaviors for each user. You might want want all your contributors to create content but not be able to post it, or see other contributions. Those who moderate only get to see articles or postings that violate certain rules or policies, or they may see everything that comes by.

Here are some examples:

• Create content
• Edit content
• Rate content
• Moderate content
• Comment
• Subscribe to a feed
• Subscribe to a newsletter
• Provide feedback
• Bookmark a page
• Share with a friend

See how non-specific this list is? These verbs don’t imply any details. Yes, you want users to “share with a friend” but at this point you don’t care if its got a CAPTCHA device to kill spambots, or if it posts to a database and blind copies you on the sent email, or if it uses AJAX to regex confirm valid emails. Down that path leads madness! Madness, I say!

This list of verbs is crucial because it will communicate to your web site team a list of things that you want to see come out of their work, things they will either have to build or buy in order to support your overall objective.

For example, your team might look at your nouns and verbs and say, “Listen, this looks like a community site to us, so we recommend using XYZ framework. It’s free, it’s fast, and it handles 90% of what you’re talking about, but it doesn’t do ratings. It looks like ratings are pretty important to you, so we’ll need to either find a ratings module (which might cost some money) or build it ourselves (which will take 100 man hours).”

Two light bulbs should be going off in your head right now:

• I’ve just made the job of working with my web geeks much easier!
• Gee, my business idea isn’t as unique as I thought!

The first light bulb should make both you and your team happy. So spontaneously happy that someone over there should just cough up a check or something and send it my way. (Seriously. I can’t tell you how much unrighteous crap and inefficiency goes on because business stakeholders have no friggin’ clue how to communicate with a web development team.)

The second light bulb is equally important, and should by no means cause you despair. After all, we live in a world where competition is healthy and desired. Otherwise, we’d only have one airline, one auto maker, one ice cream maker, and so on. What you need to take away from this realization, though, is that there’s no need for you to reinvent the wheel.

For example, if you want to allow your users to rate articles, there’s no need to have some kind of ultra-specific way to do it that will take your developers 1800 hours to develop and delay your offering by three months. There are 800 or so free or low-cost modules for blogs, wikis, forums and what have you that let you implement a rating system right now without hassle and allows your team to focus on something that really matters (like making sure the server won’t crash when you get a million visitors) and lets you focus on something even more important (like actually getting those million visitors).

So there you have it, four tools that will help you take some meaningful action. To summarize, these tools are:

1. The mind map, which will help you ideate and brainstorm in an intuitive way.
2. The spreadsheet, which will help you associate some hard facts or numbers to your idea.
3. The list of nouns, which identify your users.
4. The list of verbs, which identify activities and behaviors on your site.