PRE-DESIGN PLANNING

Organizational Discovery & Website Strategy

a structured process that produces a clear, documented framework for a digital presence

EVERY BRAND NEEDS A STRONG FOUNDATION

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Here

Over the course of this engagement, we examine your organization from the outside in: your audiences, your goals, your programs, your messaging, and the relationships between all of them. The result is a strategic reference document that becomes the foundation for every design decision that follows.

Whether you work with me for design afterward or bring the framework to your own team, you will leave this process with a clearer picture of what your website needs to do and exactly how to get there.

✔ Organizational Overview & Priority Mapping

We begin by identifying what your website must accomplish over the next few years — not just functionally, but strategically. What outcomes matter most? What does success look like for each audience you serve? Where does the current experience fall short?

✔ Audience Definition & Boundary Setting

We define exactly who each part of your digital presence is for — and just as importantly, who it is not for. Clear audience boundaries prevent the confusion that sends visitors in the wrong direction and dilutes the effectiveness of your messaging.

✔ Messaging & Relationship Clarity

Whether your organization has shifted focus, reorganized, or is managing multiple programs or brands, we clarify how everything connects and how that should be communicated to the people you’re trying to reach. This includes hierarchy, positioning, and the language that brings it all into focus.

✔ User Pathway Design

We trace the journey each of your audiences takes across your digital presence — from first impression to primary action — and identify where that journey currently breaks down. The goal is a guided, intentional experience that moves people toward the right next step every time.

✔ Site Structure & Content Framework

We establish the structural logic of your website: which pages are essential, how content should be organized, what belongs front and center, and what can live deeper in the experience. This framework eliminates guesswork during the design phase and ensures every page has a clear purpose.

✔ Strategic Reference Document

Every decision made during the strategy engagement is documented in a comprehensive reference guide. This living document captures your brand relationships, audience definitions, user pathways, structural recommendations, and design direction and serves as the authoritative guide for all subsequent work.

Who This Is For

This service is designed for organizations that:

Are at a moment of transition — a rebrand, a restructure, new leadership, or a shift in strategic direction — and need their website to reflect where they’re headed
Have outgrown their current website and need a strategic framework before building something new
Serve multiple audiences or manage more than one brand or program and need each to be clearly positioned
Are scaling and preparing to engage larger partners, clients, or collaborators who will evaluate their digital presence
Have tried to design their way out of a communication problem and need a different approach

What You Receive

As part of this engagement, you receive:

A preparation questionnaire to organize your priorities and gather foundational information before our sessions begin
Guided strategy sessions designed to surface the decisions that matter most
A comprehensive Strategic Reference Document covering audience definitions, program relationships, user pathways, site structure, and design direction
Clear, documented recommendations for your website build, ready to hand to a designer, a developer, or your own internal team

If you’ve been planning a website project and something keeps telling you there’s deeper work to do first, trust your intuition. The work done here prevents costly revisions, redesigns, and missed opportunities down the line.

This engagement can be engaged entirely on its own. Many organizations come to this process specifically because they want strategic clarity before committing to a full design engagement, whether that design work happens with me or with another partner.

Pricing is provided upon inquiry and is scoped based on the size and complexity of your organization.