Collaboration is truly valuable. I revisited the truth in that statement this week while working on the CoCo website redesign project I am involved in.

The task at hand was to get the website organized so that I could start thinking about new design possibilities  for the site. But before I could do that, I had to have a clean and organized Information Architecture structure to work with. Sadly, the stakeholders did not understand the importance of not only doing a content analysis of the current site, but thinking about where they wanted the site to go. I understand it is very difficult for non design and web people to see the potential that change can bring. So I don’t blame them at all for not having the forsight to dream about the site’s potential. But if they could not do it, we had to.

So my fabulous content manager Wendy and I worked one evening to really get a site map organized. We talked about how the site exists now. We discussed the ways they organization wanted to change and the new features they wanted to include. And we debated what the navigation terms would be used.

It was a great collaboration and it was so helpful to have someone to hash out this process with. So in the case of working on a complicated process, like creating an organized and cohesive site map, two heads are better than one.