When we “rough out” a site tree, it means that we create a quick-and-dirty site structure in an hour or less.

The point of this is to do the minimum work to convey an idea to others, so we can then decide whether it’s worth fleshing out enough to test. We don’t want someone to spend an entire day creating a detailed site tree, only to have the team decide that they’re going a different direction.

To rough out a site tree:

• We only create 2 to 3 levels of the tree, even if we know there will be more sublevels. We can create the sublevels later if the tree survives our triage process.
  
  
• We don’t get stuck on wording, especially for the lower levels. At this point we’re looking more for variety than exact terminology.
  
  
• We do a quick coverage pass to make sure we’ve accounted for all the content the site will include, but again, if we miss something, we can fix it later.
  
  

Next: Picking candidate trees to test