Having learnt much about eZ publish from our test implementation we went about defining the content types, templates and rules for the gradlink site which we compiled into what we called the "information architecture" document.

It took designIT many iterations to get the information architecture to the point that we felt ready to start working on the site. The hardest part about defining the information architecture was being able to abstract content from presentation and understanding how to construct the site from the combination of content types and templates. It was difficult shift in mind set from simply constructing sites based on pages. eg. a piece of content entered once could appear in different places on the site in different ways. We had to capture all of these possibilities to ensure the site would work as expected.

What took us approximately 10 months to define and plan from the user survey through to the information architecture in the end took us just under 2 months to actually implement. But it must be remembered that the reason it only took 2 months to implement was BECAUSE we’d spent that valuable planning phase!