When you decide to do some landscaping, you have an idea of how big you want it, what stones you want to use and the variety of plants, shrubs and trees you want to plant.  Some of your ideas may change once you get to the store but you have a starting idea and this is what you measure your success by when you have completed the job.  Did the completed landscaping look like the design you had imagined at the beginning of the process? These ideas are requirements.  When wanting to create a website for your business, you also have ideas (or requirements) of what you think the site will look like and how it will work.

If you think it, ink it

Writing down your requirements becomes a very important document when creating a website.  It is your words of what you want that can be given to a website designer to work from.  If the designer has questions about what the requirements, a conversation can easily take care of it.  Many people do not take the time to write down requirements and think they can describe what want in a phone conversation.  Unfortunately, the web site they get may or may not be what they had envisioned.  This can happen due to a variety of reasons which I will not get into here.

When writing requirements, be specific.  The more general the wording allows for more misunderstanding of what you want and the more dissatisfied you will be with the website.  Here is an example of a general requirement “I want a website that displays all the items that I sell”.  That statement can leaves the door open to a lot of interpretation.  Rewritten to be more specific, it might state “I want a website that has a homepage and 3 product pages for each of my three product lines”.  Now the website designer knows how many pages you want and what kind of content will be on each page.

How much is enough?

There is no set amount of requirements that you should have for your website.  The time it takes to think about them and write them down it completely up to you but you want to take some time with this process.  Look at other sites that are similar and not so similar to what you want.  Write down what you like and do not like about those sites.  This is a good starting point for developing your web site requirements.  Also write down any questions that you have along the way.  These questions are good conversation starters when you meet with your designer.  When you feel that have thought about and written down all pertinent ideas about your website, then you are probably done at least for now.

Now what

You have just spent a few days reviewing websites, making notes, written down a few questions and have written down two pages of requirements. Now what? You can take this list to your web site designer and review it with them. They should ask questions to clarify your intentions and they will probably suggest a few more requirements.  Take this time to ask your questions that you came up with.  These questions could lead to more requirements or just a clarification to make you more at ease.  Write down any additional requirements that are discussed and provide a copy to the website designer.

When your site is complete, it should match or closely match what you had envisioned when you decided you wanted a website. You can look at the site and verify if each of the requirements that you documented are met.  Because the site met your requirements, your satisfaction with the site is higher than if they did not.