Just wanted to post a quick example about the importance of using a whiteboard during an initial meeting to visualize different areas of a site. Although we talked with the client over e-mail about the navigation and features of the site, drawing it out made it real. We ended up walking through the visitor's experience and moving things around on the fly.

Above are the final whiteboard wireframes and below are the actual approved templates. As you can see they are very similar.

Without going through this process with the client we would not have ended up with a final end product. This method eliminated countless design and programming revisions.