Commissioning A Website Part 1

Some-how its fallen on you to commission a new website...

Lets be honest, unless you've been involved with developing websites or know someone who has, you probably don't really know what your company needs and even large corporations have made mistakes in this area.

Where do you start ?

Use Google to find a company and hope they create a good website for you.

Perhaps a friend can recommend one.

No, No, No, No, No.

If you don't know what you want, the vendor will give you what they are good at doing, and not what you need.

Regardless of whether you need a new building, car or website, you have to think about your requirements. For example if a husband and wife are to share a car, the requirements could be the following -

Husband - comfortable on motorways for long business trips.
         - enough space for a ladder
Wife - easy to park on congested streets when shopping.
         - enough boot space for shopping

We formalise this process by firstly recognising the actors/users and then defining their roles. These are often known as Use Cases.

Requirements Gathering

A new website is the start a new project. You must recognise all the actors such as shareholders, employees, marketing, production, distributors and customers. Then find out how they wish to interact with the site. Also, ask your self what your high level requirements are for a website. The overriding one should be to give your company a competitive advantage. Here's a few examples -

Facilitate employees to carry out their roles
Provide shareholders with up to date information
Increase profits
Improve efficiency of internal processes
Improve reporting

This process is paramount to building a website that will serve your company for many years. Only the more established web development companies will provide this service and may employ a qualified business analyst to help you document the Use Cases.

Here's a couple of examples.

Employee - View company handbook from home.
                    View company news from home
                    Ability to occasionally work from home using the website
                    (sales) Fill time sheet in when out of the office
                    (sales) view appointments when on the road

marketing - Harvest sales leads from the website
                 - process sales from the website
                 - monitor contacts from the website and also inward and outward emails and calls

As you can see, employee types can be numerous and what they would like from a website can also vary. At the end of this process you should have a document that defines all the users and their requirements. It pays to have this done professionally, as a weak requirements document will result in a website that does not meet your needs.

At this stage we could put the requirements out to tender, but should we look at the document in more detail to make sure it fully exploits the technology available on the internet today first.

See Part 2.