Documents of the Design Phase

Once your client approves the project, the Design phase begins. The goals during the design phase are to articulate clearly how the site will meet the client's business requirements, to specify precisely what you are going to build and how your team will build it.

During the Design phase, you and your team will create several documents. The creative, editorial, and navigational briefs are used to develop a requirements definition, which in turn aids in the creation of a design and architecture specification.

The creative, navigational, and editorial briefs serve to gain initial approval of the high-level design of the site before completing the more formal requirements definition and design and architecture specification documents. Members of the Web development team, sometimes with the input of the client, create the briefs prior to developing the requirements definition.

The creative brief explains the graphics, animation, and overall visual design of the Web site.

The navigational brief explains how the user will move around the site, including identifying the primary content categories of the site, such as the home page and About Us.

If you have not done so already, you can download examples of each of these from the Resource page. You may also want to print them, as you will be using these documents in future course exercises. In the next lesson, you will learn about the requirements definition and the design and architecture specification.