I thought I’d share this with you as I’ve been asked more than a few times about how I go about creating new plugins and other products.

Well…

First there’s the idea which you immediately have to enter into your ideas doc even if it’s only a few words.  I’ve had quite a few disappear on me when I haven’t done this.  You think you’ll remember them as they’re such a good idea, and guess what?  You completely forget.

It would be funny if it weren’t so annoying.

Anyway.  Ideas rarely arrive fully formed in your head.  You might have a vague inkling of something and think “Yeah, seems interesting…” and that’s the point you have to get it down so it doesn’t get lost.

Then you might leave the idea a bit to “cook” in your background processor.  This is a trick I learned a while back.

What you do is you really think about the idea, brainstorm it, write more notes down, and even discuss it with a “victim” down the pub who doesn’t know what you’re talking about.  Spend at least 20-30 minutes really thinking about it and then forget it.

The effort of thinking HARD about it puts your subconscious to work on the problem.  I think of it as my background processor.  Then a few days or weeks or sometimes month later…  Ding!  The idea is cooked.  Just looking through your ideas doc at the notes again might be enough to trigger the completion of the idea.

Then once the idea is ready you start working on it a bit and refine it all.

At that point if it’s a plugin you can hand it over to your developer to start work on.  If it’s a BIG program then I like to follow the “prototyping” method where possible where you ask for a little bit, get it working, then add to it and tweak a few bits and pieces and so on until it’s all done.

For my own personal preferences, I like to write.  Sometimes I’ll do a video and sometimes I *might* do a little sketch, but I’m not the best in the world at drawing.

My new developer has introduced me to a really cool little FireFox addon called Pencil.

With it you can do flowcharts and mockups of the layout etc.

Here’s a Pencil drawing he sent me the other day for a new plugin we decided to call Ad Slider.  It’s based on my initial written description of what I needed for my own business.  Most of my products are developed because I need them to use in my own business.

In this case I wanted something that would be easy to add ad banners to WordPress, and to make them transition into other ad banners.

I wanted it to be driven by short codes and ad groups.  So you’d create an ad group and then add ads to that group.  The plugin would generate a short-code-tag for use anywhere on your blog, posts pages and widgets.  Wherever you placed the short-code-tag, then the ads associated with that group of ads would transition with nice javscript effect.

We had a little back and forth and then he sent me this updated drawing.

I okayed it and he’s been working on it and it should be ready in few days time.

And that’s it.

That’s pretty much the entire process we follow from idea to product. Easy-ish isn’t it really?

You can ask questions or leave a comment below.

-Frank Haywood