Where do I start — part 2?

The commitment has been made and development can begin, but what exactly are we developing? Guess what — more questions.

Who’s going to control the website?

Projects need a single point of contact to operate efficiently. Decision by committee, whilst the most democratic approach, rarely provides the reliable and rapid response needed during a development project. The same applies once the website is launched. Someone needs to take editorial control, whether you’re managing the website yourself or not.

When selecting your representative it’s important that they can be easily contacted at short notice. Remember that time lost could turn out to be expensive; late decisions in development adversely impact on deadlines and resources; delaying new content may lose visitors and sales.

What functionality does the website need?

Approach the question of functionality from the perspective of your target audience rather technical capability. What do you think your visitors are going to want to find on your website and enjoy enough to want to come back?

The technology behind the Web is capable of providing a vast range of functionality. This topic alone is worthy of a book, but here is a list containing a few suggestions:

Articles

Longer articles like this one can present ideas, products, anything. Think of magazine articles and you’ve pretty much got the idea.

News posts

Posts can be thought of as items in a newsletter and are often accompanied by RSS feeds to improve distribution to a wider audience. These are the basic components of a blog or weblog and may or may not support visitor comment. I was wondering which example to use… then I thought of my blog, jameswhinfrey.co.uk.

E-commerce

How could I not include this? The ability to buy and sell almost anything over the Internet, the best known example has to be Amazon.

Discussion forums

Forums provide a way for your customers to ask you questions and discuss your products and services. It’s hard to find a great example, but this is Apple.

Wikis

Wikis enable the collaborative generation of content and they’ve been used to create product documentation and online knowledge bases. Take a look at Wikipedia.

Galleries

There are a number of online image galleries, try flickr to see a great example.

Multimedia

This is a very wide category, examples of which are animation and audio content — podcasts, take a look at iTunes for that one.

How often do I need to modify the website?

Content management.

Depending on the length of your audience’s attention span, you need to keep the new content coming. If you need to regularly add new content, the ability to do it yourself may be attractive; but consider whether you have the time and skills to create interesting, high quality content. If you don’t then pay someone who does to write the copy for you; you’ll get a better product and save yourself a lot of time.

Look and feel.

If your audience is very design conscious the look and feel may need updating relatively frequently. Even if they’re not, you can’t ignore this aspect and a fresh look will keep visitors interested. You’re probably not going to do this yourself, so expect to consult an agency and pay for this work. Technical features in the design can make this process much quicker and more effective; foremost amongst these are web standards compliance.

And now we can start the development.

The next topic I’m going to address is broadly how the project progresses from this point to deployment, but that’s for another time.