Website Planning: Turning Research Into a Smarter Website Strategy

Part 2 of the August Ash 7-Step Process Series

A great website isn't built from a checklist, it's built from a thoughtful plan.

In Part 1 of our 7-Step Process Series, we explored why great websites start with research—and how understanding your business, your customers, and your data creates the foundation for better decisions.

But gathering information is only valuable if you know what to do with it.

That's where Plan, the second phase of our process, comes in.

Planning turns what we learned during research into decisions about what the website needs to say, how information should be organized, and how users should move through the experience.

From Data to Decisions

Planning starts by turning what we've learned about the current experience into a strategy for the new one.

That means looking beyond a list of existing webpages. We can use analytics to understand how people currently move through the site, where they enter and exit, which content they engage with, and where they may be getting stuck. We can also map key customer journeys to understand the steps different audiences take as they work toward a goal, along with the questions, needs, and potential friction they encounter along the way.

A content inventory, a review of what exists on the site today, adds one more input to that picture. Combined with analytics, search data, and customer journeys, it helps us answer the more important question: what does the new website actually need?

An important page may not be getting the traffic it should. Customers may use completely different language than your internal team. Multiple pages may be competing with each other or answering the same question. A key user journey may require information that's difficult to find, or that doesn't exist at all.

Some of what exists will carry forward. Much of it will be combined, rewritten, or replaced, and some of what the new site needs won't exist yet at all.

The goal of all this analysis isn't to recreate the existing website with a new look. It's to use what we've learned to make deliberate decisions about the experience we're creating next.

Creating Information Architecture Around the User

Once we understand the content, behaviors, and journeys we're designing for, we can begin defining the site's information architecture.

Information architecture is the broader structure that determines how content is organized, labeled, prioritized, and connected so people can find what they need and move through the site intuitively.

The sitemap is one important piece of that work. It provides a visual representation of the site's hierarchy: which pages exist, how they're grouped, what belongs in the primary navigation, and how those pages relate to one another.

But we're not simply sorting pages into tidy categories.

The structure should reflect how your audience actually thinks and searches for information. The terminology customers use may be different from the language used internally. What feels like the obvious way to organize information from inside your organization may not make sense to someone encountering it for the first time.

For more complex experiences, journey mapping can help us look at that structure from the outside in, ensuring key audiences have a clear path toward what they're trying to accomplish.

And when a proposed structure needs validation, user testing can help us test it before moving further into design. Putting a sitemap, navigation concept, or key journey in front of real users can reveal whether people understand the labels, know where to go, and can find important information without unnecessary friction.

Planning gives us the opportunity to identify and solve those problems while the experience is still relatively easy to change.

Planning How the Experience Works

With the larger structure established, planning can move from the site level to the page level.

Wireframes or prototypes help us translate the information architecture, customer journeys, and content strategy into an experience before visual design begins.

At this stage, we're not deciding on colors, photography, fonts, or other visual details. We're working through more fundamental questions:

What does this page need to accomplish? What information does someone need, and what should they do next?

Wireframes can establish:

• Content hierarchy and storytelling
• Calls to action and conversion paths
• Functionality and interactive elements
• Reusable components
• Relationships between different types of content
• How key experiences work across the site

Depending on the project, prototypes and user testing can add another layer of validation. Rather than waiting until a website is designed or built to learn whether an experience works, we can test important assumptions earlier and use those findings to refine the plan.

It's much easier to change the blueprint than the finished building.

A Plan Gives Design a Purpose

Research helps us understand the audience, the business, and the opportunity. Planning turns those insights into an intentional structure and experience.

By the time we move into Design, we've already answered many of the questions that shouldn't be left up to visual design alone: who we're designing for, how they'll navigate the site, what content matters, what key pages need to accomplish, and how we'll guide users toward meaningful next steps.

Design can then focus on bringing that strategy to life.

That's the value of the Plan phase: making important decisions early, validating them when needed, and giving the work that follows a clear purpose.

Coming Next

In Part 3 of our 7-Step Process Series, we'll move into Design and look at how the strategy, information architecture, user journeys, and wireframes developed during planning become a visual experience built around the people who will actually use the site.