Tip from an amateur. Start with the boring stuff, boring stuff can also be translated into Information Architecture, if you don’t know what that is, fire up this link and read for a few hours… or days. (note I said tab because I’m that trendy).

This step is key to functional design and making sure you’ve covered all your projects needs. The worst thing you can do, and I repeat, the WORST thing you can do, is get super excited and then open up Photoshop and start whipping out ideas. The problem is.. you have no direction, no end all goal. Your literally wandering around in the dark. Here’s an analogy to clear things up.. Using wireframes is like.. When somebody close to you gets a brand new car. It’s a car you swear you’ve only ever seen like once, and you tell the dude who got it this… “dude, that’s a sick car, I’ve so never seen that.” And surely what happens for the next month you somehow manage to see about 20 of those cars, in fact you see them everyday, all day. So, the moral of the story is this, once you set a goal you begin to make it happen, your thoughts are narrowed down to your original intent, to design a “functional” web page and not to design a “nice looking” page. So in summary, don’t go into photoshop and play around with web 6.0 reflections and glossy buttons until your done your wireframes, sitemap, and all that other IA goodness. got it? Good