Documenting the Project: What to Include

You must include full documentation of your Web sites. Documentation is an essential part of every Web development project.

In this class, the documentation you are required to include with assignment 2 (HTML Web site) and assignment 5 (Project Web site) will include the following sections:

Analysis of the Project:

• What is the purpose of the site? What do you expect to accomplish?
• What are you offering your audience?
• What do you want users to do on your Web site? After they've left?
• What kind of site is this? (Purely promotional? Educational? A publication? A point of sale?)
• What features will it have?
• What are your most important messages?
• Who are your competitors?
  
  

Target Audience Analysis:

• Who is your primary target audience? What about secondary audiences?
• How Internet savvy are they? How technically savvy?
• How will they be accessing the site? Can you make assumptions about an average user's connection speed? Platform? Browser use?
• How often do you expect them to visit your site? How long will they stay on an average visit?
• What functions will the target audience perform while at the site?
  
  

Goals and Objectives:

Goals and objectives are useful planning devises for Web designers. In order to design content and materials for any publication, it is necessary to have a sound basis by which success can be measured. Well thought out goals and clearly defined objectives allow designers a method to find out how successful their material has been. In your documentation, you should list 3 goals with 3 related objectives.

Goals and objectives are frequently blurred and confused, so make sure you know the difference between writing a goal and writing an objective.

Goals are broad, imaginative statements. Objectives are carefully drawn statements that tell exactly what is to happen, or what participants are to do. Objectives are specific, quantifiable expressions of one’s goals.

• Goals are broad; objectives are narrow.
• Goals are general intentions; objectives are precise.
• Goals are intangible; objectives are tangible.
• Goals are abstract; objectives are concrete.
• Goals can't be validated as is; objectives can be validated.

In order to write effective goals and objectives statements, consider the following two questions:

• Who will be doing the behavior?
• What should the visitor take away from the experience?

Creative Brief:

Sometimes the entire set of documentation is known as the "creative brief." For this class, the creative brief refers only to this section of your documentation.

The creative brief should take into account the above sections (project analysis, target audience analysis, goals and objectives) and then describes visually and sensorially how the interface design will address these issues.

The Creative Brief defines:

• The mood of the site; the look-and-feel (e.g. does the site convey authority, playfulness, service? Is it conservative or provocative?)
• What colors the site will use, why these colors, how will they be used?
• What fonts will be used?
• How will the navigation system work? How will the navigation system and the interface design be integrated?
• Will there be any special features like rollover graphics, pop-up windows, multimedia, etc.

Site Architecture:

For your project Web site, you should also include a section for page or architecutral documentation, which explains the organizational structure of the site. This can be in the form of a chart (like the example in step 3) which lists the filename of each page, the topic of each page, and describes the content available there.

Mock-ups/Comps:

Mock-ups (sometimes known as comps) give visual descriptions or pictures of how the project will be implemented.

In the real world, mockups must be extremely detailed because the clients will probably sign off on them to give you authority to produce the final pages.

A mock-up is a high-fidelity representation of a web page that shows exactly what the page is supposed to look like.

They are usually produced using a graphics application like Photoshop and are not interactive. Unlike schematics, the graphic design of a mock-up is meant to be taken literally.

Mockups or comps are developed from thumbnail sketches. They detail the answers to the following questions:

• What exactly does the site look like?
• What/where is the content?
• How will the content be structured?
• How will the users move through or navigate the site?

* For your Project Web site, you should include either a mockup storyboard, that uses screenshots of the actual layout to illustrate how the content will be structured as a user navigates through the site or a detailed series of thumbnail sketches that illustrates the site's content organization and navigational system.

Style Guide:

The style guide lists the design conventions used throughout the site. For example, the chart below lists the styles used throughout this Web site. Include hexadecimal color codes, text formatting conventions, and text within graphical elements such as headings or navigation bars.