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Your design treatment should be professionally presented (i.e. typed, no spelling errors or typos, etc.), and it should have these elements:

Similar sites review

1. Review 2-4 sites similar to the type of site you wish to create for your final project. The similarity can be approximate, and does not have to include content (e.g. a hockey site may have some features you want to use in your chemistry site). List the URLs and titles, and cover the aspects of these sites that are salient for your project. It's better to cover a few things well than many things generally.

Reasons for your site

2. State in a sentence, the general purpose of the site

3. Provide in a paragraph or two some kind of justification for the site. Specify an intended audience, say something about their general characteristics, and something about how they will access the site.

4. List some goals and/or objectives you hope to meet with the site. If you are making an educational site and you've had some theory courses, throw around some names and terms here.

Note: This seems to be the hardest part for most people. See my page on writing goals and objectives for help

Your site plans

5. Draw a logical flowchart for the site. Not everyone is familiar with these; ask me to show some examples.

6. Provide a sketched or printed page template or templates - what elements do you want on most pages, what colors, graphics, etc.

7. List other specifications that you will have in addition to my required specficiations. These will include things like table values, colors, design themes, and other things you want held constant throughout the site.

The site reviews might take 1-2 hours; after that, you can probably write 80% of the remainder in an hour. Note that this has nothing to do with actually producing pages, so don't get hung up in technical stuff yet. Also this is a draft document that will almost certainly change as you build your site, so don't worry about getting everything straight from the beginning.