[thelist] SITE BUILDING: plan of attack OR how do you experienced people tackle a from-the-ground-up website?

[Chris W. Parker]

hi.

at the company i work for i am a one man
web-design-network-administration-tech-support-all-around-computer-guy
team and i am coming up on the redesign of one of our current sites.
although it would technically be a *redesign* i am going to treat it
like a from-the-ground-up project since it's going to be so much
different and hopefully better.

my question to all you experienced people is this... how do you go about
preparing for and making decisions about a new website? are there stages
i should go through? is there any sort of standard/recommended procedure
to building a site? what do you do?

i will be building a CMS for this site and other sites in the future as
well and i'm not sure how to integrate it. should i build a plain boring
looking site that is the CMS by itself and then integrate it into the
*real* site that everyone will see? or should i build it into the *real*
site right from the get go?

should i make drawings on paper before i go into photoshop or start
coding? ...

i want to make sure that i do this is well planned and prepared as i
possibly can. i want to have almost every caveat recognized and
hopefully solved before i reach them. (in other words i want to plan the
site so that i don't come up against any "oh crap! i don't think this is
going to work." sort of stuff.)


thanks for all the help,

chris.