First you need to understand your audience, and that is little more difficult in web design than in usual software projects. This will apply the user centric design as in the user view of the 360 Degree Software Design. Modeling the audience for a website leads us to the question: Whom are we building this page for? It is normally the client's customer? Thus we need to ask our customer about this and hope to get answers that are applicable.
The audiences will be divided by classifications and then described by the audience characterization. This is required because of the complexity of website audiences first, but even because the interaction may differ between the different classes of audience. The interaction is strongly dependent upon the mission the website will follow. This mission is always a difficult analysis, and it should be part of this first step in website design. Professor de Troyer claims the decalration of the mission statement is the first step. This idea is not followed within this article because it is not in-line with the plan of project butterfly and this fits strongly with web design.
Another point in the discussion of the WSDM is the type of requirements engineering (RE). Professor de Troyer supposes to include this in the mission statement. Good idea, indeed, but I'd rather like to define a project phase called requirements engineering that starts right at the beginning, but never ends. Instead it is an accompanying process during the whole project. There is no other class of software project that suffers from so many change requests as websites do. Therefore, a well defined RE should be explained and completed.
