Large web-site planning

What resources are there for planning a large site?

[awcabot]

I will (hopefully) start in a few weeks the planning and managing the creation of a large site for a news agency, specialazing in international news and foreign affairs.

I have a rather good understanding of the news agency's requirements, a good understanging of internet business (largely through this WebmasterWorld and other work), but my only direct experience has been with small sites, that were little more than some HTML, brief cgi-scripts which I edited and graphics. In these I did a rather good job, occasionally being congratulated for the work I did by total strangers (this will be not be discussed).

However I do not have direct experience with managing the creation of a large,industrial strength site. I will have the resources of programmers and other webmasters within the company, but I do not want to look like a total fool.

I have ordered two books, "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites" (an O'Reilly book) and "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability". What other sites or books or even threads within this site can I be indicated to make a large site?

[oilman]

good old pen and paper flowcharting is essential IMO. I map all my sites on paper first. I usually make them look kinda like a pyramid so I can see the whole site and once and look for potential bottlenecks in the flow. Also take a few days and really dig through the top competitors sites in your field. You'll learn some of what to do and some of what not to do.