First time poster on here so hopefully this doesn't sound like a silly question.
I am a graphic designer / illustrator who took the plunge to leaed web design, and I'm fairly competent now with html and css. But even though I can implement javascript on my pages, I still struggle to write any original code of my own design. I am a visual person, and what really helped this leaing html/css was being able to visualize the dom structure because it meant I could literally draw the code and box structure before writing it.
But with javascript I struggle to picture how all the code blocks fit together. JQuery is helping but its still a problem. I know I can't be the first person with this problem, so here is my question:
How do you seasoned programers start when looking at a blank page? Do you do anything to rough out the plan like how I would sketch with a drawing. Do you create a flow chart of the program, or do it in little chunks that function on their own then wrap them all together? Hell, I'd just appreciate any suggestions for better practices when starting a project.