Establish an information architecture:

• Use index cards to design hierarchy and categories.Ê
• Define categories in terms of user goals NOT client or author knowledge.
• Ensure that catagories are not duplicated -- there must be evident and obvious differences between catagories so that users will 'naturally' know where to expect certain information and authors will 'naturally' know where to place such information.
• Design classifications as though they cannot be changed -- otherwise you'll be re-designing every six months
• Name sections carefully.
• Allow for differing comprehension styles by designing alternative navigation to reach the same information.
• Design from the top level down and design for breadth... people don't want to drill down more than three levels.
• Design for growth not just the content you currently have.
• Test, test and don't stop testing. Get as much feedback as you can -- you are designing foir other people to use and understand.

The Web is a new medium in an old context The editorial conventions of English, and the complex traditions of document design were not invented along with the Web in the early 1990s. Most of what you need to know about to create a high-quality Web site has been in the Chicago Manual of Style for decades. Virtually every major page layout, typography, or illustration convention useful for Web design was present in books published in late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, and most fundamental layout practices predate Gutenberg. Our current page layout conventions have survived and evolved through centuries of natural selection that has weeded out the bad ideas and rewarded the useful ones.
Patrick Lynch, 'Visual Logic: Ten fundamentals of Web design'

More offsite information:

Gerry McGovern, 'Information architecture: using card sorting for web classification design'

James Robertson 'Information design using card sorting'

Gerry McGovern, 'Information architecture: learning how to classify'

For more about establishing basic information organisation and display schema go back to:

order and expression >>>>