Going with the flow... flowcharts and content lists.

The important aspect of planning is thinking through the implications of what you're trying to do. It's very tempting to jump straight in and start designing pages but the project will go a lot smoother and you'll have much better control if the plan drives the design and not the other way around.

Now that you have a framework for your site and an idea of how the content fits together, assemble it into a flowchart. A flowchart can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. It will help you to keep the relationships between the groups clear and illustrate the links between them. The idea is to produce a coherent, well-balanced result and a web site that’s easy to navigate.

Your home page is at the top of your chart, under this are all the pages that the home page links to and so on down the tree. The flow chart will give you an outline of your site illustrating the hierarchies in the structure. It's a good blueprint to refer to as you work.

Now you have a flowchart it's time to write up a content inventory list for your site. Do you have all the content you need? Can photos be scanned in from company material or do you need to hire a photographer, organise a shoot and get the images translated to digital format? Is your logo in digital format? Is your text written and available or do you need copywriters to put new material together? Do you have the time or the skills available to do all this in-house or will you need find outside contractors? How long will each item take to produce and how much will it cost? How many people need to be involved in each of these decisions and who has the final veto?

With a content inventory you can begin to get a more realistic picture of how long the project will take and how much it’s going to cost. Most projects run head on into reality at this point and a re-think will often result in a much leaner, meaner project specification.