Evaluate your competition

Chances are you'll be competing with someone from the minute you decide to have a web presence. To make sure you meet your audience's expectations, look around - sites that will be competing directly with yours, and make a comparison between your site and theirs. To do this effectively, you must document all your findings, you can write them down or better yet, you could create a comparison chart that will allow you to see graphically where you and your site are standing among your competitors.

Remember, every feature that your site and your competitor's site has, must be considered and documented. Don't just center on how nice your competitor's site is, go deeper and center on things like Site Design, Navigation, Layout, Look and Feel, Personalization, and Technologies used - such as Databases, Scripting languages, etc.

Work on the Details

Now that you've defined your site's goals and evaluated your competition, work/expand on the site details such as Document Structure, and Navigation.

Document Structure refers to how things will fit in your document - that is content, navigation itself, advertisement, links, etc. A well thought out document structure will ensure that just about everything falls into place when actually developing the site.

Here is an example of the document structure for one of the sections in Web Builder 101 (version 4.0).

As you can see, just about everything was thought of at the time our IA process was being carried out.