Our team starts with a two-pronged approach: creating a site map and a content outline, which are the two most basic site architecture documents and standard deliverables on all our web projects. 

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The Site Map:

A site map is a blueprint for your website's navigation, pages, content sections, and hierarchical relationships. It’s a 10,000-foot view of what will be and is where we begin to understand the scope of our effort visually. 

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The Content Outline:

After a site map is produced, we’ll create a content outline – a narrative view of your site that describes how the “story” of your experience will unfold. This document identifies each main section of the site and breaks down the contents a little like a term paper, talking through the intent of each page and how it fits with the larger story your site will tell. 

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Both exercises are used to inform the creation of wireframes — a heavily abstracted visual blueprint of your site’s final design. That’s the point where things will start to look more familiarly “web-like,” and where hierarchy from main navigation to headlines, body copy, interactive elements, tags, placeholder copy, and imagery to inline links will be included.