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As you consider any new web development project, this Online Work Plan will help you begin defining an online strategy aligned with your goals and resources. Take your time to work through these questions.
Who has either authority or significant vested interest in the outcome of this project? Who will need to be consulted throughout the development process? This could be just you, this could be you and your boss, this could be a broader coalition of people and/or organizations. The more people involved, the more energy you will need to dedicate to internal process and communication.
What is your organizational mission and primary goals. Identify these clearly before trying to define the goals for your web site. Your web site should support your fundamental organizational and/or campaign goals.
What are the primary organizational strategies which support your overall mission/goals.
1. Goals of Online Publisher (that’s YOU): Why do you want this web site (or online tool)? How will it benefit your organization? How can you use it to enhance your mission? When a user comes to your site, what would you like them to do, learn, experience? What information should they have easy access to? How do you want them to interact? What methods of feedback would you like available to them?
2. Primary Audience (s): Are you building a site for a very specific constituency, the general public, the media, o r all. Knowing who you’re speaking to will help you develop a plan that reaches them.
3. Goals of Site User: Once you’ve established your primary audiences, you can start to develop use case scenarios. When a user comes to your site, what will they mostly likely be looking to do, learn, experience? What information will they want easy access to? How will they be looking to interact and engage?
4. Key Message:
What’s the most important message your online presence should relay?
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Detailed requirements will be established once the development process for your project begins.
However, it is helpful to both clarify and document any known requirement beforehand.
Business requirements document the business functions that the web site will support. These can include everything from selling books, to standardizing the look and feel of a site, to building a grassroots movement to fight poverty worldwide.
What types of content will be used on the site? For each type of content identify the following:
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What is the purpose of the content? Is it related to any other content?
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Does it exist in web copy today?
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Does it exist in some other format (i.e. Word, xls, PDF, graphic)?
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Who owns it?
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Who maintains and updates it? Is there any workflow associated with it?
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Who is the audience for this content?
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How often is it updated?
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Is this content static, or does it need to be available for only periods of time?
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If the site is bilingual, is the content translated? Does it need to be?
The web site must do certain things to support the business objectives. These functions need to be clearly defined. Functional Requirements could include:
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Personalization Functions: Registration and Sign-In, Welcome Back, enabling a user to sign up for newsletters, etc…
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Transactional Functions: Shopping Cart, integration with backend systems like financial software, reviewing and selecting products
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Security Functions: Creating a secure registration page, ensuring passwords are secure, secure shopping cart payment information
In order to ensure the web site will support the number of users who will visit it and ensure the functionality works properly, technical requirements needs to be document such as:
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Expected volumes of users
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Expected peak periods of use
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Types of content that will create high load (like video and audio files)
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Security Requirements (is the site a secure site, rules for passwords)
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Performance Requirements (i.e. page load time)
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Operating availability (i.e. 24/7 availability), including maintenance periods
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Support requirements
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Database Sizes (for storing content)
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Types of Browser to support, including browser resolutions
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1. Overall Tone: What’s your desired overall tone for the site? Authoritative? Fun? Quirky? Edgy?
Youthful? Whatever tone you choose should connect to the audiences you’ve identified in the previous section.
2. Look and Feel: Colors, design themes, graphics?
3. Organization Specs (if applicable for brand continuity): Logos, specific fonts, colors?
4. Web Sites You Love: From a visual design perspective, list a few web sites that work for you. Be specific about what you like
– Colors? Shapes? Spaciousness? Images?
5. Web Sites You Hate Again, from a design perspective, what sites really do not work for you, and why.
When you’re building a web site, the technical capacity of your audience will largely influence your development tools and the final site structure.
If you’re audience consists of advanced users with the latest technology, that’s one thing. However, if your audience consists primarily of folks who rarely use the Internet and certainly don’t have fast connections, that’s also important to know up front.
1. Access: Mobile, laptop, desktop, fast connection, slower connection?
2. Plug-Ins: Are your users tech savvy enough to have necessary plugins for multi-media (updated
Flash player, windows media player)? As web browsers increase in sophistication, this issue is less and less relevant.
3. Technical Expertise: How savvy is your audience? Are they familiar with Internet conventions?
How much hand holding will be required?
4. Disabilities: Important and usually not addressed. Blind? Color blind? Physical disabilities? All are important considerations. If you’re building a site that may be used with voice activated software, for example, you will need to accommodate this.
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Consider the maintenance requirements for your web site at the BEGINNING of the development process. This will save you much heartache in the long run. Identify your resources and build what you can afford to maintain. You may also consider investing in infrastructure that allows for easy maintenance by non-technical administrators.
1. Who?: Who will be maintaining your site? Someone in house? A contractor? If you know that someone who barely understands HTML will most likely be the designated maintenance person for your site, the site structure and design should allow for easy maintenance.
2. What?: Graphics? Plain text? Streaming media?
3. How Much?: Are you uploading 100 pages of new content a day, or 2 pages a week? You will need to develop the appropriate structures to accommodate your maintenance needs.
4. How Often?: Are you updating content once a week or 3 times a day?
What offline systems will need to be integrated into the new web project (e.g. a membership database, or a donor tracking system)? Also, what potential online systems would significantly affect your offline systems? For example, if you implement an e-commerce system, this will need to be integrated with your offline accounting system.
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Do you want to do this again in 2 years? Probably not. Carefully evaluate your potential organizational trajectory, and build a web tool that can accommodate future growth. If you know you’re launching a particular program one year from now, build the online capacity to support this now.
1. Where will you be in 1 year?:
2. Where will you be in 2 years?:
3. Where will you be in 5 years?:
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