What to expect in an initial web site design delivery

I am managing the web site redesign for a RI non-profit. We recently engaged a firm and received their first delivery this week. This was their initial visual design for the site and it consisted of three home page designs. There is not enough substance in this for a customer to respond too. Every customer’s web site has several different kinds of content and I expect to see in an initial presentation a few significant pages. Having these in hand gives me more confidence that the visual design will fit the needs of the site.

There are two broad categories of visual presentation for a web page -- the casing and the content. The casing is the parts of the page that are used consistently across the whole site. The part’s purpose remains the same but the content might vary. For example, mast-head, logo, copyright notice, navigation, primary content, and secondary contents. The content is the body of the page, the primary content, and the reason that the page exists at all. This visual presentation is typically a layout of several paragraphs, pull quotes, side bars, tables, and figures.

Regards the casing, there are three kinds of presentation I would like to see:

• "Home page."
• "Section page", for example, the partners’ page.
• "Detail page", for example, a partner page.

Navigation also needs to be presented as part of the visual design. There is the navigation that appears in the casing and the navigation that appears in the content. There are five kinds of navigation:

• "Parent to child", for example, partners to partner.
• "Child to parent", for example, partner to partners.
• "Peer to peer", for example, partner to partner.
• "Internal link", for example, partner to an engagement.
• "External link", for example, to RI Foundation.

If you have pointers to exemplary public examples of this please send them to me. The examples that I have belong to Dynamic Diagrams, Ingenta, and their customers.