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Creative Strategy

In the context of commercial work this is typically the process of understanding a clients business objectives and goals and determining the creative approach. This involves taking a client down a path of questions, scenarios and examples, and turning the output into a creative format (a brief, storyboard, wireframe or visual design). There's the very obvious type of rich concept driven projects, but I'd like to think that even the most basic, information heavy or technically complex types of projects inlude something that I can clearly point to and call the creative strategy.

User Experience

Putting a companies URL into a browser window and hitting enter is the first of many tasks that visitors to your web site will perform. The success of achieving the next task is based off of how you've approached some of the following user experience related practices: identifying and understanding your audience, accessing relevant content, approach to the homepage design, navigation design, applicable functionality, and overall usability. I also think that good communication with the information architect and engineering team helps the creative concept and visual design. Once a new site is live it's a matter of closely following its metrics and listening to visitors feedback. I'm yet to work on a project were there hasn't been a need to go back in and make modifications to what you first thought was a perfect idea (Nothing more that just tweaks, I promise).

Visual Design

It's still the barometer of whether we judge a new site as a success or failure. Whether we like it or not, the easiest time for clients to absorb how everything comes together is when they are confronted with the first round of visual design. Not only does a designer need to feel excited and inspired by the design challenge, they also need to feel properly educated on the challenge that lay ahead. An understanding of the site objectives, competitors' sites, the brand, and the technical and user experience related limitations sets the stage for a design that works.

Development

Are you familiar with the standards-based methodology for web design? This is a major movement within the industry that is driving the concept of separating style and content with CSS based layouts. It's for all the right reasons too.