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Website Content - Lesson 4You now know what your e-business website is going to be about, who will be visiting it and what your competitors are doing. You can now get down to the finer details of what in specific your website is going to contain. The team of people giving you input on your website would have a general picture in their minds of what your website is going to contain. They can now be a part of refining broad ideas into specific website content. Upon completion of this is phase you will be ready to create the structure and organization of your website. You and your team will now need to answer two questions:
ContentYou can start generating the content of your e-business website by creating a content list. A content list is simply a list that that describes the information that your website should have. Once your list is created you should group and label the content. Make sure you involve everyone in your team when generating a content list. The list of goals for your e-business website, the audience definition list and the competitive analysis notes that you have created will give you guidance in generating a content list. Browse the websites of your competition and add any information that you did not think of to this list.Types of content include static, dynamic, functional, and transactional. Copyright notices, privacy statements, and membership rules are examples of static content. Dynamic information may be content such as news, articles, updates, posted events - information that changes or is updated regularly. Functional content may be elements of your website that are based on different functionalities such as searches or drop menus. Transactional content would be any transactions that may take place on your website like payments or ordering. Review and categorise the elements of your content list. To do this you may want to write each element of the content inventory on an index card and organize the cards into groups. When you are satisfied with how you have grouped the content, name each group. Be as descriptive as possible without being verbose. Record the name of each group and the elements within it separately. The content of your website will be structured according to the final groupings and names and they will form the basis for your site structure. It has been claimed that gathering content is the number one bottleneck in creating an e-business website. The content list that you generate should help solve this problem. Your content list will be the basis of your site structure. Functional RequirementsIn order to plan how your website will work, you need to create a list of functional requirements. Once again you will need to refer to the list of goals for your e-business website, the audience definition list and the competitive analysis notes that you have created in order to workout the functional requirements of your e-business website.You should use the content list you've created to refine your functional requirements list. If you notice that elements of the content list require you to build functionality around them, you must include these in your functional requirements list. For example, your e-business website may require signup pages for email newsletters, member logon pages and other pages involving forms or transactions. It is important at this stage to make sure that the people involved in building your e-business website have the skills to develop the functionality you require. You should therefore discuss the feasibility and technology needs of each functional requirement with your team. Ask yourselves the following: Do we have the technology and the skills to develop each functional requirement? Do we have the time and money to buy or build the functionality that we want? You should now look at your functional requirements list and rank the importance and viability of each functional requirement. You may need to get rid of some functional requirements based on available resources, importance of the requirement and deadlines that you may want to meet. The Design DocumentNow that you have organized the content and defined the basis for your website's
structure, you should create a new chapter in your design document. Call this
chapter Content and Functional Requirements. This chapter should include a
summary of the content list, a description of how the content is grouped and
named, and the list of functional requirements. The content list should be
included as an appendix to the design document. Once again, remember to publish
these results so that everyone in your group can see them. |