Website research and initial design

I started today by looking at existing meal-planning tools and websites. The NHS five-a-day meal planning tool (above) is something I already know about and have tried to use - unsuccessfully. Although most meals are healthy, you have to choose each meal yourself which is a lengthy process, and it doesn't give consideration to budget or ethical concerns. Try using it here!
The Love Food Hate Waste meal planner (below) is also something I have tried to use. This is difficult as there is no way to tailor the two week menu to your personal needs, e.g. number of people or budget. It is also not very concerned with health. Try using it here!

Foodwitch (see below) is a blog that I came across today. This is quite similar to my own ideas - the author is concerned with welfare and healthy issues, as well as budget. The biggest problem here is the usability of the information. In a blog format, it is hard to use the weekly menus, and impossible to tailor them to your own needs. All prices are based on Ocado, which is not relevant for me. An interesting resource - see it here.
Credit crunch weekly meal planner (below) is part of the site 'Good to know recipes'. It promises family dinners for a week for £40. However this only one meal a day for a week. Looking at the comments at the bottom of the article, the main problems people have are that there is only one menu example - so it only helps for one week of shopping. I want to provide lots of varied menu options. See it here.
I found a fair few other sites, blogs and articles but the more I looked, the less usable they became. Initially I tried to use Illustrator, then Photoshop, to create images of how my website might look. With no experience of web design, I found this really difficult. I decided to use pen and paper for now, and hand-draw my ideas. I have found this much easier. After drawing a kind of frame for a page, I can then scan it in and use Illustrator to experiment with colours and Photoshop to move things around. I can then print this out and evaluate it myself.
Using the website map that I put together on the studio wall yesterday, I've tried to start sketching how the main pages might look. Because I'm working with pen and paper the pages all look very hand-drawn but this is obviously not how they would look.
This process has worked really well for me today - every time I draw a page of the website, I'm constantly thinking about each element on the page, how it should be arranged, how to make it clearer, what pages this page will lead to and how.
I'm finding it challenging to design the website - it is like a different language of design that I need to get my head around! But I'm really enjoying it, and I think that by hand-drawing each page I'm pushing my ideas more and questioning them.
Tomorrow I plan to continue drawing possible web pages, especially those that are community-centred so I can think more about those services. I also want to start thinking about the minimum amounts of data I will need to make the site believable.