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Website Requirements

Website requirements are a list of necessary functions, capabilities, or characteristics related to your website and the plans for creating it.  There are several types of requirements that may be defined during the process that come together to focus and prioritize the project plan.

Types of Requirements

There are many different types of requirements documentation.  At a higher level, most can fall within one of the following categories:

  • Business Requirements define the objectives and what problems the stakeholder intends to solve with the product.
  • User Requirements describe how user expectations and how they will interact with the product.  Use the features, functions, and content described in your scenarios to develop your requirements. Your user scenarios should outline the tasks your users want to complete on your site.
  • Functional Requirements provide details of how a product should behave and specify what is needed for development.
  • Quality-of-Service Requirements detail what characteristics a product must maintain in order to maintain its effectiveness and any constraints.
  • Implementation Requirements are used to detail changes in process, team roles, migration from one system to another, etc.

Using Website Requirements

Website requirements only tell you what your website 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.

Requirements Best Practices

Requirements can begin as a phrase or one-sentence description of what the site must have or must allow users to do but will become more detailed as you move through the process. Requirements gathering can be complex but they help ensure project success.  The following characterize strong requirements documents. They should be:

  • Specific and not conjugate two distinct requirements
  • Complete and well thought out
  • Consistent with and prioritized based on the objectives outlined in governance documents and charters
  • Able to be verified during testing