10 Ways to make sure your Web Site specification succeeds
February 9th, 2009
Developing a Web Site can be great fun and an opportunity to show the world what you can do in a modern and accessible format. But before you get started, it’s important to consider how to develop your requirements of the site. Have a look at these 10 tips to help you get started:
- Appoint a Project Lead for the web site. This helps you form a coherent project with a central point of contact and responsibility. It helps us because we know we can talk to them and use them as a “channel” into the business.
- Have you thought of the “back office“? Many sites, particularly e-Commerce sites, require support behind the scenes to track stock, monitor user submissions to the site and more mundane issues such as who is responsible for receiving contact requests from the site.
- Make sure you have a clear purpose for your web site. Is it a brochureware site where visitors can find out what you’ve got to offer? Is it an extranet site that extends your internal business system(s), helping both you and your customers? Or is it a e-Commerce site that needs to make a profit in its own right?
- What is the site’s target audience? Are they young, old, professionals or casual shoppers? This will help decide what kind of user interface is appropriate, and what design style will work best.
- Keep in mind increasing legal requirements for accessibility for hard of hearing or partially sighted users who may require larger text/contrasting colours or browse using alternative platforms such as braille or speaking browsers.
- Do you have a marketing campaign for your new web site? Remember to add your web site to all your stationery, outgoing emails and branding to embed your web site address (URL) into the minds of your [potential] customers.
- How will the site be maintained? Will it be updated regularly? If so, you can use a Content Management System to manage your own content, such as our ACTMaster CMS.
- How will you measure the effectiveness of your site? We can help configure statistics and analytics to help you quantify visits, but this goes hand in hand with less quantifiable analysis such as asking your new customers if they found you through your web site.
- How interactive will your site be? While techniques such as Flash are great for users who have it, some information is better presented in a page of text - especially for optimising for search engines.
- Having a look at how other sites look and feel can help a lot. A great starting point is our Portfolio of recent sites to help get some ideas and form a starting point for your own site.
