Understand the clients goals
We don't guess at why or how our clients want to become successful online ... we ask them.  They tell us.  We listen.  Then, we help build the website required to accomplish the goals communicated to us.  Still, the first part of any of our processes is to find out as much information we can from our clients about themselves and their business.

Understand our clients' competition
Yes, we go out, do our own research, and analyze our clients' competition.  We consider this to be part of the development process.  How can we attempt to help develop a better mousetrap if we don't know what the best mousetrap looks like?  We look hard at these competitors, what technologies they employ, what volume of business they are gaining, design attributes, and much more.  Then, we feel confident we can do better.

Build Wireframes
Once we have all the information we need, including client inputs, branding information, competitor analysis, and our own creative vision, we lay out the pages to be later designed by our creative partners.  We don't try to make everything fit on a page, and we don't even assume that we (ourselves) should be the ones to assign color palates (that is for our designers to determine).  We use the wireframes as a guide in order to build our sitemaps, give early indication of direction, and progress, to our clients, and to properly and professionally allow our designers to engage our clients with clean, relevant design ideas.