[thelist] reorg & redesign at the same time?

I'm with Jeff on this one too.  The design for useful,
information-based sites should flow from the info.
architecture (WARNING: cache phrase).

I know you didn't ask for it, but here are some tips
I've picked up for identifying optimal info. arch.
structure on pre-existing sites.

*Identify common paths users take through the site...
  By checking your web logs and looking for navigation
trends,  you can get a good idea as to what info. is
most important to users.  Info. arch. is about designing
a site structure which lends itself to intuitive use by
users- what better way to do this than finding what
they most want and making it easily accessible to
your main navigation.

*Identify information that users need and include it...
  Trap search queries that don't return any results
and analyse them to see if perhaps users are searching
for information you should have but don't on the site.  
Ask various site maintainers what information they
get emails about, and what information they feel should
be included.  Most importantly, ask you users what
they would like to see.

*Provide search functionality on every page...
  Nothing is more frustrating to a user than having to navigate
 to a search feature.  This should be prevalent in your design
and should be available on every page.  Remember, 85% 
web users find things through search engines, so leverage
that inherent skill to allow them to cut through to what they
want.  You may have the most intuitive navigation in the world,
but some people have just gotten addicted to those little 
search boxes.  Just adding a search feature isn't enough
though- you have to make sure that the results you return are 
useful...  The simples way to do that would be to copy the
structure of results returned by the big search engines.  
Ensuring that results are relevant is a given.  
Side note:  I've been toying with the idea of automatically
redirecting users to a particular page if their search is a
common one that has an exact match.  On a mid-sized site,
I would guess that the number of these would be less
than ten, and probably closer to 3-5.  You don't want
to make assumptions, but there are cases where you'll
be right 99% of the time.

*Don't let the site's architecture flow from the org.'s structure...
  Your users have no freaking clue as to your internal org.
structure, nor could they care less most of the time.  As such,
what may seem intuitive to you as the architect won't make
much sense to them.

Those are the big one's from my perspective, the rest really
fleshes itself on a site-by-site basis.  Webmonkey has a
great series of articles on the subject:
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/98/28/index0a.html
Some of it may be a bit to formal for many purposes, but it
still provides a nice framework and a lot of useful information.

One other suggestion I have regarding a reorg&redesign-
Once you get to a "beta" stage, start another production server
with the beta site running on it, and let your users hammer
on it and solicit feedback from them.

Well, hope that helps,
Christopher Atkins