Project Design

See the Tutorial for step-by-step guidance on designing and building a WikiWriter project.

Project Structure

The basic idea is to create a project directory, then do your page editing for the project in that directory. Start with a Home page, and build links and subpages from there. Let the purpose of the site determine the design.

You could use the Home page as a master table of contents, and put a link for every page right in Home. Or build a tree structure, with a half-dozen links on Home, each link going to another page with another dozen or so links — the typical Web site design.

For an e-learning course, you could connect the pages with Previous and Next links for a sequence of pages within a lesson. I like to use an Up link to get back to the start of the lesson. The WikiWriter Tutorial) is a typical e-learning design.

Project Functions

The key to WikiWriter's power is the ease of creating links and new pages. When thinking about the design for a new project, decide whether the main access function is to choose one of a number of similar pages (a reference with a large main Table of Contents), or a sequential flow along a specific path or branch through connected pages, or anything in-between. Functions addressed well by WikiWriter are:

• free-form text filing
• sequential narratives
• daily info or story updates (diary or blog)
• planning and design outlining
• project documentation and updating
• web site construction
• instruction and tutorial development

Project Types

What kinds of sites can you design and produce with WikiWriter?

• PIM - Personal Information Manager. Use the Home page to list subjects, names, lists (shopping, to-do, etc.), and put the details on each relevant page.
• Textbase - Create a free-form texbase, an idea-monger, for all that loose stuff, Post-Its, and snippets you want to keep on hand.
• Book or manual - Outline your book on the home page. Start with a page for each chapter, break the chapters into subchapters when the project starts bulking up.
• Tutorial - Teach someone how to do something.
• Courseware - Construct a solid instructional course, complete with branching loops for remedial follow-up on wrong answers.
• Web site - Publish the webified HTML export to the Web.
• Program documentation - Developers can outline their program in WikiWriter, with a page for each function or subroutine, with active links from one function to the next, to build an active walk-through of the project before doing any coding.
• Project specification - Designers can write up a program spec by describing the user interactions and program screens in WikiWriter, to prototype a testable version of a program before launching the development project.
• (Your idea here)