planning process:
goals
audience
competition
content
structure
design
  Source: Information Architecture Tutorial
defining your site's goals

Why are you creating a website? Finding a true purpose of your site is essential to success. If you don’t know what you are trying to achieve, why bother building a site?

 

people
You want all the key people to be involved in sharing their opinion about the purpose of the site being built but you don’t want everyone making decisions about content. You are aiming for consensus along the way. Good communication is a key.

questions
Make a list of questions to ask:

  1. What is the mission or purpose of the organization?
  2. What are the short and long term goals of the site?
  3. Who are the targeted audiences?
  4. Why will people come to your site?

Record everything being said. You will redefine it later.

edit the responses
Time to generate information out of all the data:

  1. Rephrase the questions as goals (leave the targeted audience for later).
  2. Take it back to your team to have them rank the goals and offer additional comments.
  3. Analyze the ranking and produce master list.
  4. Make sure the list is approved before proceeding.

Congratulations! You defined the goals of your site. You are ready to move on.

 
define your audience