Your website is your major assisting tool in reaching your business goals. It is essentially the most important representation of your business so, regardless of the website complexity, it is crucial that it works properly.
If you are not a developer, you are going to delegate the website development task to the internal or external team. Naturally, you will need a tool to help you monitor the process and evaluate the results. In other words, you will need a set of specific rules and metrics to ensure that the web development team deliver the desired results.
This set of rules and metrics is presented as Website Design Documentation.
Website documentation is a must as it provides easily accessible information on a product and gives answers to important questions pertaining to:
The benefits of website design documentation include:
Easy-to-enable control
Well-created website design documents help you track the project progress at all stages and will let you prevent or notice any coming pitfalls.
Time saving
If something goes wrong and you would like to change the team, you can do it with minimal waste of time. With the available documentation, the new team can easily understand the current status of the project and dive into work without delay.
Tool for evaluation
The performance metrics and quality/functionality requirements will help you easily evaluate the quality and completeness of the job done.
Every website is a result of some idea and time/resources investment in this idea. So, the process of website creation highly depends on these factors. To get the best results, you will need some specific type of website design documentation that fits the process.
There are 2 common website development approaches:
Fixed Scope/Price
You have a full/complete/comprehensive concept and picture of structure, functionalities and interfaces of your future website and some distinct budget for its implementation. All you need is the team that can guarantee to deliver results you require within the budget you set for the project.
Time and Materials
You have the overall idea of the website as a product but there is no complete picture of its structure, functionalities and interfaces. Plenty of new ideas and requirements will be added to the website concept. In this case, you need the implementation process to be quick and smooth.
There are certain characteristics that define each type of website design documentation development approach.
The effective website documentation within Fixed Scope approach is created by:
At this stage, key participants are Business Owner (BO) and Business Analyst (BA) .
BO needs to formulate core functionalities of the website. To formulate core functionalities correctly, BO answers the following questions:
Below, there is Web Browser Market Share page of Statcounter website that can be an illustrative example for understanding this point in detail.
Who: web developers, marketing specialists, ecommerce websites owners;
What: information about web browsers popularity.
Once the core functionalities are defined, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) specialists join the process for accomplishing the next stage of outlining wireframes.
Wireframes are interfaces for the core functionalities delivery. For example, to deliver the websites popularity info, there should be an interface with such components as:
Business Analyst helps specify the functionalities for different wireframes for different user roles .
UX and UI Specialists help divide those functionalities by wireframes and create mockups of those wireframes.