I would regard a quality website as a site that provides an excellent user experience for it’s visitors. In this blog, I write about some important steps that are required to define the requirements for such a website.

Step 1 – Agree a vision for the website

A vision for a website is important because it defines the scope and intent of the site. A good vision statement has the following characteristics;

• It includes a value and a measurable goal
• It is a concise statement
• It should be closely related, if not the same as the business vision statement
• It is written in the present tense and helps the visitor to visualise

Step 2 – What’s the strategy to achieve the vision?

The typical website’s strategy is to attract and retain customers. To help define the types of customers, it can be helpful at this stage to develop personas or profiles of each type of user outlining their motivation and objectives for using the website.

Along with the strategy, one or more tactics are needed to implement it. For example, a typical tactic for an eCommerce site is the offer of a discount to first time buyers on the site.

After these two steps, a website owner has decided on what they want to achieve with their site, their target audience and a related  set of tactics.  The focus now moves onto putting the website into place by deciding on the specific functionality and design of the website. One important point to note is that these subsequent steps can occur in parallel, if desired by the website owner.

Step 3 – What’s contained in the website?

This step is all about deciding what information is to be on the website in order that the vision and strategy is to be achieved. This requires an information architecture that describes;

• The different sections of the website
• The information topics in each section
• The type and format of content used for each topic (video, text or images)

The information architecture should contain guidelines on the appropriate content to be written for each section on the website and thus is a big help for the content writers. The architecture also outlines the likely navigation paths between the various different sections on the website for each of the types of users or personas that the website is planned for.

Step 4 – What’s the appropriate design?

In simple terms this step is all about defining the look&feel of the website (i.e. the colours, fonts, imagery etc). These design requirements should reflect the businesses branding and corporate imagery – consistency is important. Your design requirements should also include the best practices from usability and accessibility standards.

With this information prepared, a company is now in the position to start building their website, initially through a series of design templates and mock-ups. As the work develops, static html pages can be used to illustrate and review work in progress before finally building a website with the appropriate client or server side programming to deliver content and functionality to the user.