Define the job
Decide what the site should help customers understand or accomplish. The right architecture follows from the goal.
Website planning guide →Before requesting quotes
Write a one-page website brief.
A useful brief can be simple. Describe the business, the most important audiences, the actions visitors should take, required pages, functionality, content responsibilities, examples you like and any deadline that has a real business reason behind it. Add the current website and analytics situation if this is a redesign.
This document gives designers something concrete to respond to. It also exposes differences between proposals: one supplier may include content strategy and migration while another assumes the client will deliver finished copy and manually handle old URLs.
A good starting brief includes: business goal, audience, required functionality, likely page groups, content responsibility, existing systems, ownership expectations and how success will be measured.