When a new website gets the green light, the first response is often: "Great! Let's start writing." That can sometimes work, but it's usually a better idea to plan your site out first – laying down the structure before the content, just as you'd draw a floorplan before building a house.
To do this, you need a list of all the bits and pieces of content you'll want on your site: event listings, HR policies, lab opening hours – absolutely everything.
Depending on the size of the site you need, this can be a fair bit of work, but we promise: it's worth it. And if you skip this step, and build your site without a plan, there's a good chance it'll look a lot like a house built without a blueprint.
Architecture is hierarchical
To go back to our house analogy, you don't just throw a building together all at once. You need to follow a structural hierarchy: foundation first, then the supporting walls, and so on... Try building the roof before the walls, and you're going to have a bad day.
Similarly, once you know exactly what content will live on your site, you can start organizing it into a hierarchy called an "information architecture." For our purposes, that's just a fancy way of splitting your content into intuitive groups, sub-groups, sub-sub-groups and so on. These groups will become the sections, sub-sections, etc. of your site.
