Design
Information architecture
Information architecture is the structure of a website: which pages exist, how they group, what each one is for and how a visitor moves between them. It is decided before design and determines most of what design can do.
Architecture is easy to skip because it produces no pictures. A sitemap on a whiteboard does not look like progress. But every later decision sits on it: a page that has no clear job cannot be designed well, and a site whose structure mirrors the company's org chart rather than the customer's questions will fight its own navigation forever.
The useful questions are simple. Who arrives, what are they trying to decide, and what do they need to see to decide it. Pages follow from the answers. A common failure is one page trying to serve three audiences, saying less to each; another is ten pages that all say the same thing because nobody assigned them distinct jobs.
Architecture also governs search performance. A site with one page per intent ranks; a site where everything is on the homepage does not. Which is why I settle the structure and the messaging before a single screen is drawn.
Structure comes first in the design serviceDesign