So, at this stage you have gathered the requirements, selecting domains, colours, etc. It’s now time to do the website analysis.

As part of this series: DOWNLOAD Business Requirements Document Template FOR FREE! You’ll need to add the web site designs and mockups in the document.

Let’s determine our goal first. The goal of this exercise is to come up with design ideas. We will now decide what menu we’re going to use, what it’s going to look like, what breadcrumb and left navigation controls we’re going to use, what programming language we are going to use, etc.

Selecting professional web site designs

Based on the approved site structure and colour theme, it’s now up to us to determine how we’re going to design the site. I personally start from http://www.templatemonster.com to get some ideas. There you can select thousands of website templates that have been designed by professionals. I wouldn’t mind purchasing if a particular design looks really-really good.

Determining how to approach the design

Once you’ve selected the design, it’s now time for us to determine how we would approach it. For example, on a particular design that we’ve selected there is a drop-down menu. We have to determine how we can develop that drop-down menu. Whether we’ll need a Javascript or third-party vendor control or whatever.

There will be other elements of the design that require development. Some may need programming. These include image buttons, navigation controls, footer, header, etc.

Determining how to approach functional requirements technically

On the website requirements that you’ve collected before, client may need a latest-news roller on the homepage. We will now need to determine how we can make this happens. Whether we’ll be using database to store the news, or file system, or XML file, etc it is all part of this exercise.

There may be another requirement to have a contact form on the site where visitors can post an enquiry online and the posted enquiries can be retrieved later. It’s our job to determine how we’ll approach this.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, this step really gets us to do a bit of research and planning so that we have ALL the resources we need to develop the end product: the professional web site!

Remember, even with a lot of planning, things can still go wrong. They will just go even worse if there is no planning at all. So, before we’re touching any code, let’s get the planning right.

Until next time,

Tommy