I have saved several doomed projects by spending a few days with the client to carefully listen to their needs and set the right expectations. Armed with nothing but a pencil and paper (or their digital equivalents), the process is incredibly simple, but...

So what is this one-page write-up? It is a simple document that explains how it feels to use the site. In almost all the projects I have worked with, when someone new joins the team, they will be quickly discouraged if asked to go through every bit of paperwork. But they will be thrilled if they find a single-page document that quickly tells them what the site is meant to be.

You can call this document whatever you like—concept document, market requirements document, customer experience documentation, or even an Epic Fragile StoryLog™ (patent pending). It really doesn't matter.

The document should focus on the user experience rather than technical or implementation details. Make it short and interesting to read. In fact, Joel Spolsky's rule number one on documenting requirements is funny.

If possible, write about a typical user (persona...

In the early days of building web applications, tools such as Photoshop and Flash were used extensively to get pixel-perfect mockups. They are hardly recommended or used anymore.

Giving a native and consistent experience across mobiles, tablets, laptops, and other platforms is now considered more important than getting that pixel-perfect look. In fact, most web designers directly create layouts on HTML.

Creating an HTML mockup is a lot faster and easier than ever before. If your web designer is unavailable, developers can use a CSS framework such as Bootstrap or ZURB Foundation framework to create pretty decent mockups.

The goal of creating a mockup is to create a realistic preview of the website. It should not merely focus on details and polish to look closer to the final product compared to a sketch, but add interactivity as well. Make your static HTML come to life...

When you have a fairly good idea of what you need to build, you can start thinking about the implementation in Django. Once again, it is tempting to start coding away. However, when you spend a few minutes thinking about the design, you can find plenty of different ways to solve a design problem.

You can also start designing tests first, as advocated in the Test-driven Development (TDD) methodology. We will see more of the TDD approach in Chapter 11: Testing and Debugging.

Whichever approach you take, it is best to stop and think:

• What are the different ways in which I can implement this?
• What are the trade-offs?
• Which factors are more important in our context?
• Finally, which approach is the best?

The best designs are often elegant and harmonious as a whole. This is usually where design patterns can help you. Well-designed code is not...

While preparing a development environment, make sure that you have the following in place:

• A fresh Python virtual environment: Python 3 includes the venv module or you can install virtualenv. Both of them prevent polluting your global Python library. pipenv is the recommended tool (used in this book as well) for higher-level management of virtual environments and dependencies.
• Version control: Always use a version control tool such as Git or Mercurial. They are lifesavers. You can also make changes much more confidently and fearlessly.
• Choose a project template: Django's default project template is not the only option. Based on your needs, try other templates such as Edge (https://github.com/arocks/edge) by yours truly or use Cookiecutter (https://github.com/pydanny/cookiecutter-django).
• Deployment pipeline: I usually worry about...

This book believes in a practical and pragmatic approach of demonstrating Django design patterns and the best practices through examples. For consistency, all our examples will be about building a social network project called SuperBook.

SuperBook focuses exclusively on the niche and often neglected market segment of people with exceptional superpowers. You are one of the developers in a team comprised of other developers, web designers, a marketing manager, and a project manager.

The project will be built in the latest version of Python (version 3.6) and Django (version 2.0) at the time of writing. Since the choice of Python 3 can be a contentious topic, it deserves a fuller explanation.

Beginners often underestimate the importance of a good requirements-gathering process. At the same time, it is important not to get bogged down with the details, because programming is inherently an exploratory process. The most successful projects spend the right amount of time preparing and planning before development so that it yields the maximum benefits.

We discussed many aspects of designing an application, such as creating interactive mockups or dividing it into reusable components called apps. We also discussed the steps to set up SuperBook, our example project.

In the next few chapters, we will look at each component of Django in detail and learn the design patterns and best practices around them.