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Design |
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Determine Web Site Requirements
- What are requirements?
- How do you develop requirements?
- How detailed should requirements be?
- How do you use requirements?
If you have done all the steps in Analyze, you are ready to design, write, and develop the Web site. A first step is to get a list of requirements for the site.
What are requirements?
Web site requirements describe the features, functions, and content of the site. They are a list of what the site must have and what it must allow users to do.
Requirements might be general features and functions, such as:
- search
- contact us
Requirements might be specific features and functions for your site. Perhaps your Web site must allow users to:
- apply for grants online
- sign up for email alerts of contract opportunities
- purchase products
- get data from a database
Requirements might be specific content or content areas that your site must cover, such as:
- reports of research
- articles on health for the general public
- lists of funding opportunities
- links to other related sites
- reports of meetings
- press releases
How do you develop requirements?
Site requirements should reflect your users' needs.
The first step in developing requirements is to review the scenarios you wrote. The scenarios should describe the 10 to 30 most important and most frequent tasks users will want to do on your site.
Begin by extracting the requirements from each scenario. What features, functions, and content must the site have for users to successfully complete each scenario?
How detailed should requirements be?
At this point, requirements can be a phrase or one-sentence description of what the site must have or must allow users to do. As you move through the process of designing the site, you may develop the requirements further with more detail.
Eventually, you may want to write the requirements as Use Cases, which describe in great detail how users will interact with the site to accomplish the scenarios. Before you are ready to develop use cases, however, you must do some of the other design steps.
How do you use requirements?
Requirements only tell you what the Web site must have and what it must allow users to do. Requirements do not tell you how to design or develop the site to have those features, functions, and content. The other design steps help you figure out how to make sure that the site is organized, written, and designed to satisfy the requirements.
Next steps
To organize the Web site, begin by conducting a content inventory of your current site to identify what items you already have and which items you will need to add based on your Web site requirements. A content inventory is also helps you to begin organizing your site in a way logical to your users.
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