Finally resolving to turn your old website into an efficient, new marketing machine or taking your first steps into the World Wide Web is an exciting endeavor. You’ve got great ideas, and you’re ready to tell them to someone that can listen and make them a reality. You know what you want to see, but how do you get there?

While seeing a mock up of what your visitors will see when your new website is live is the real exciting part (a design concept, as we call it), there’s one very important – albeit boring – task that must come before that big reveal. It can be called information architecture, user experience, site architecture, or any other variety of terms, but what’s really involved – at least to some extent - in most of these activities is determining what pages will be in your site and where or how they will show up.

It’s sometimes hard to visualize how your site will actually work when you see the pages in an outline format or as a sitemap that looks like a flow chart. The following article from SEOMoz.org likens the process of laying out your site to filing documents in a file cabinet – making the whole idea of how your site will work at least a little easier to visualize:

The Filing Cabinet Theory of Site Architecture

It can be hard to think about the details of all the pages in your site – no matter how small – when all you really want to see is the design. But laying this foundation in the beginning goes a long way in ensuring a smooth and successful website project from start to finish. In the end, you’ll have a website that not only looks great but one that functions even better.