Structure Before Style
Every site I design starts as a list of pages and a few lines of text. The look comes later.
Before I design anything for a website, I write down what will be on it: a sitemap and a short outline of each page, in plain text. The client reads it, we change what needs changing, and only then do I start on the look. It's a short stage, and the cheapest point in a project to change things.
What I Prepare
The outline is a document. It lists every page and, for each one, its sections in order, with a sentence on what each section has to do. Next to it I draw the same structure in Figma as a map of pages, so it's easy to see how they connect and what goes in the menu.
A home page outline might read like this:
- First screen: what the company does and who it's for, in one sentence.
- Proof: two or three projects, each with the task and the result.
- Services: what you can order and where each one starts.
- Questions: the doubts a visitor has before getting in touch.
- Next step: a short form and what happens after it's sent.
The map of pages can be very short. Sometimes it's a single page, and how I decide that is in one page or a full site. For the Lattice concept, a site for infrastructure software, it was seven pages: home, product, customers, security, pricing, docs and changelog.
Why Plain Text Comes First
When people look at a finished layout, they react to colours and type first, which is natural. A list of sections gets a different kind of feedback. Is this the right order? Is something missing? Does this page need to exist at all? In a document, each of those answers is a quick edit. In a finished design, it can mean redrawing several screens.
What Usually Gets Cut
Pages and features often drop out at this stage. A page that seemed necessary in the first message turns out to repeat another one. A feature serves a rare case and can wait for a later version. Clients usually make these calls themselves once they see the whole site written out in one document.
How It Turns Into Design and Price
Once the outline is approved, the visual work has a clear job. Each section already knows what it has to say, so the design can concentrate on how to say it. The approved list of pages also goes straight into the fixed scope, because the number of pages and how much each one has to do are what the price mostly depends on.
Structure is the first stage of every web design project I take on. If you have a site in mind, send me a short message about it, and we'll start with the list of pages.