This is where you design the site, not the pages. You want to define the key information units and the links between them. I call these the Structural Links. You also want to outline the key processes that will happen on the site.
We'll do some inside-out designing by describing our company, products or services, customers and processes.
And we'll build up our definition of who our visitors will be by creating detailed profiles of representative individual users that will be the basis for our page and feature design. We'll use the descriptions to develop design specifications to pass on to the technical folks.
We'll also do the outside-in part of the design process. Here we'll review what happens when individual visitors come to the site. We want to design an experience that is good for them and helps achieve our objectives.
Finally, we'll harmonize the two structural designs so we have something to turn over to the folks who will do the technical work of design and coding.
You're ready to move to the next stage when your Site and Experience Design are done and you have completed vendor selection.
