See the [[b Tutorial]] for step-by-step guidance on designing and building a [[b 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 [[b Previous]] and [[b Next]] links for a sequence of pages within a lesson. I like to use an [[b Up]] link to get back to the start of the lesson. The [[b WikiWriter Tutorial)]] is a typical e-learning design.
=== Project Functions
The key to [[b 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 [[b 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
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=== Project Types
What kinds of sites can you design and produce with [[b WikiWriter]]?
* [[b 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.
* [[b Textbase]] - Create a free-form texbase, an idea-monger, for all that loose stuff, Post-Its, and snippets you want to keep on hand.
* [[b 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.
* [[b Tutorial]] - Teach someone how to do something.
* [[b Courseware]] - Construct a solid instructional course, complete with branching loops for remedial follow-up on wrong answers.
* [[b Web site]] - Publish the webified HTML export to the Web.
* [[b Program documentation]] - Developers can outline their program in [[b 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.
* [[b Project specification]] - Designers can write up a program spec by describing the user interactions and program screens in [[b WikiWriter]], to prototype a testable version of a program before launching the development project.
