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Having spent the last few weeks gathering requirements for my employer’s new website, I thought I’d distil down what I’ve learned and publish it. Hopefully, this should assist me to do future projects in a consistent and efficient manner.

The following are the starting points that should give some structure to this information gathering phase of the project.

Goals and objectives
Quite simply, this area can either make or break a website. Projects that start out with clearly defined goals and objectives will usually succeed. Expand this by finding out about your client,

 » their business plans, goals and objectives,
 » what they want the website to achieve,
 » how the website will be classed as a success.

Key audiences
Know who the website is for. Find out very specific information on the main website users. Spend some time up front creating profiles and personas for each of the key audience groups. A clear understanding of your audience will affect all other requirements.

Design
There is nothing more subjective in a website project than what makes a good design. There will be certain mandatory aspects for design such as usability, accessibility and company branding. However, a competitive analysis of the client sector will show common features and standards. While finding out what a client likes and dislikes at the start of the project may pay dividends when presenting the final design.

Content
If there is one area of a website project that is going to be late and cause problems then this is it. Generating content is usually done by the client and suffers universally from a serious underestimating of the timescales involved. You must be able to account for this. When looking into the requirements for the website cover areas such as:

 » the ongoing management and publishing of content,
 » the standards for publishing,
 » content audits to ensure the relevance of the content.

Functionality
What functions and features will make up the website? While in full blown ecommerce sites this will be a major exercise, even smaller sites will require some level of functionality that will need to be scoped.

Infrastructure
For new websites you will need to establish infrastructure requirements, such as:

 » your hosting environment and domain name,
 » supported platforms and browsers,
 » the need for a content management system.

While for re-designs you will have to understand the infrastructure of the current website and determine whether this is suitable for the new website.

Testing
Contrary to popular belief testing isn’t only undertaken once the website is complete. Different types of testing are done through out the project. During the design process user testing should be undertaken to make sure the design works for your key audiences. All functionality should also be thoroughly tested. While, quality assurance testing should be done at various stages. Especially just before going live.

Training
Depending on the scale of the project, training could be either a big requirement or a fairly minor one. For websites that have multiple publishers and the use of a content management system, training is vital to ensure the quality of the website is maintained long after going live.

Administration and maintenance
Finally, the roles of who will administer and maintain the website are best established at the start of the project. Having the right people, with the right skills will ensure the website improves over time and doesn’t degrade after going live.

Gathering requirements is only the beginning of the website design process. However, done right, it will make the rest of process substantially easier.

Labels: website design process