Map of the site
It is obvious that you create a site to be visited. Mostly a Website is aims at a well defined group. The pages you are now viewing were created for those who want to start publishing on the WWW but have no experience.
For the sake of this course we are creating a (small) Website for a small Cartographic company, which wants to get some pages about their activities and map products on the Web.
Let's start by giving the company a name: "LovelyMaps"
The first question that they have to answer is

"Who is the audience?"
A short checklist might give a helping hand:
Is your audience visiting your site from their work environment, home, or both?
LovelyMaps is not publishing themselves, but produces maps for e.g. Publishers, travel agency's etc. They are not in the first place aiming for the home-browsers, but really for commercial visitors.
What kinds of information are they looking for?
Nice maps
What would really attract them to your site?
Examples of beautiful and fast loading maps
Hardware software requirements, do they use the fastest machines and biggest screens?
If it would be only the graphic-oriented end, maybe. It is more safe to take the middle range as a standard.
How fast is their connection to the net, do they have a high speed modem, even ISDN perhaps? How motivated will they be to wait for large graphic images?
People are restless, if a page takes longer than 20 seconds to load, mostly the new visitors "click-on" and are gone. Never start with a "heavy" page.
Is your audience likely to accept new technology and unconventional masterpieces of design?
In this case it is difficult to tell who is in charge, so let us keep it simple.

"What do I want to tell them?"
The audience should know that "LovelyMaps" is capable of producing the maps the audience needs, so get in touch...!

"How am I telling it?"
Giving a brief overview of the company and for the rest with examples of products (preferably produced for other customers).

Time to start now with taking pen and paper to sketch the site.