Nathan Campos

I know a lot of developers that immediately after they have an awesome idea, they start coding it. Let me begin by saying that if you do this, you're completely doing it wrong! In this article I'll be teaching you how to start the right way, so you won't get disorganized in your own mess of ideas for your project.

First of all, create a folder or create a new project in your IDE and add a TODO file to the root. In the first line of this file you will put the main concept of your project. Later, make a simple topic list with things that you want to implement, how you want them to be, what is the style to be used, if there will be the need of any 3rd party library, and so on. Here is a simple example made to help you out a bit:

Dream in Tech
A new kind of site that will give the users the best content about technology, programming and other geeky stuff.

* Get a domain under .net
* Get a cool theme
* Write at least one article each day
* Improve the authors.php design
* Correct the unknown link bug
* Make the header 100px tall
* Continue like this...

After you have made that, you can start to code, but as you progress and have other ideas, don't forget to add them there. After you start accomplishing your topics, keep the list more organized by separating the finished ones of the pending ones. Like this:

Dream in Tech
A new kind of site that will give the users the best content about technology, programming and other geeky stuff.

To-do:
* Write at least one article each day
* Correct the unknown link bug
* Make the header 100px tall
* Continue like this…

Finished:
x Get a domain under .net
x Get a cool theme
x Improve the authors.php design
x Continue like this...

Organization is the most important thing when you're a developer. Leave a comment saying about how you keep your projects organized or if you use any program to help you.

This article was imported from my old blog . Some things may be broken.