Nobody would build a house without a blueprint. No factory would build a car without a plan. A plan is the starting point for any solid project. Without a plan, you’re sure to wind up somewhere you, well, didn’t plan on.

Our heritage is in a company that builds bespoke websites for clients. Since the beginning of our business, we’ve always adhered to the idea that regardless of the vehicle we choose to use to tell it, our job was primarily that of a storyteller.

In the case of websites, we use pages, text, and images to tell that story. While we often coordinate the text and image creation for our clients, it’s always a two-sided street. Whether supplying, helping to create, or simply approving the content for a website, our clients are involved in the process.

There are those in our industry who chose to build websites without prior knowledge of the navigation or content for a website. We think it’s a bad approach. While there’s something to be said for planning for any eventuality, we think tailored pants just fit a little better. Would you design a website the same way if you knew it had 500 words per page instead of 100? Would you design it differently if it had 15 levels of sub navigation instead of 2? We would like to think the answer is yes…

When we developed Jumpchart, it was for that very reason. We wanted to design websites around the content rather than build a website first, and shoehorn the content in later.

So if today you are starting a new website project, we would ask that you have a good plan before starting. In architecture this would mean surveying the intended uses of the building, the intended square footage, the intended population. With websites we think the architecture should be decided by the content, and the structure should be as well.

If a website is like a building then it’s content plan is its blueprint.