[Closed] Specifying up a website

Yeah - think about the people who are going to be accessing the site (including your own editors!) and write a series of stories about what their needs are and what they expect to get from the site.

Write about what you regard as business success

Happy to talk about it more but it's run (okay, jog/shuffle) night tonight. Drop me a reminder by email

Rachel

+1 from the above.

One thing which piqued my interest, is that this is unexpected i.e it sounds likeyou dont know why it is being suddenly offered. What problem are you trying to resolve with your current website? Increase traffic / business? Streamline a business process by implementing self service or booking? reduce costs?

writing the stories above is easier if you understand what the outcome should be.

Current site is both some poor content and some poor content organisation. Even I as staff member who helps manage the site struggle to find things on it. As a small charity, we have 1900 pages 🙁
We put in a simple email expression of interest in a fund that provides new websites to third sector. By return of email we have been asked for a Skype next week to scope a new site.
In addition, a long term funder has offered support to reorganise our content or site - and today said they were happy to collaborate with the other funder. Unexpected to say the least.

MOB - check the T&Cs very carefully. I heard of someone else in the third sector who got a special deal through a special scheme to update their site. The output was fine, but they were then tied into hosting the new site with the provider of the development which cost them about 4x as much each year as it would at a normal developer...

I will check out t&c's well, but first glance it is a genuine grant scheme for tech sector to support third sector.

Grab some post it notes and get stuck into some Agile user stories.

Remember that it's not just you that is using the site so imagine from all your users point of view.

As a content writer I want to x

As a customer I want to y

As a potential funder I want to z

https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/user-stories

You can the easily prioritise your requirements within your team.

No need to get any software to do agile but you could try Trello for free if your team is across multiple sites.

Thank you all.
This morning I made a list of our website users - from staff and from google analytics & customer enquiries.
I then did the story thing - and it really helps shape the site intention and requirements.

Don't forget with user stories the last part "so that" is important as well, because it helps weed out spurious ones.

As an <actor> I want to <task> so that <reason>

Then the developer can group stuff together by actor, tasks, or reasons for estimation and development purposes.

You'll be having daily scrum standup meetings before you know it 😉

In fact that might actually be worth it if you get the funding and want to keep the designers/developers on track

Remember not to forget this stuff when you get down to specifying it. I've just watched someone go through that work and then ignore it all once they got down to imagining what was on the front page as they got sold the usual rotating banner, a few irrelevant but pretty pictures and a twitter feed nonsense. Utter gash in the end 🙁

Is this the BA thread?!?

I've nothing more to add than what is described above, other than to suggest you always think about what you want to achieve, but not how you do it. The developers and designers will work out the best way, so there's a risk that you make your requirements too precise which puts some constraints around the finished product.