Business Case

Don't hide your business case from the team that will build your site. If you force people to operate in a passive manner on 'your' creation then you can only get what you ask for, and that can be a long and costly way from what you want.

Use Cases

Use Cases describe the different ways that users shall interact with your site. You should have prepared your use cases right at the outset so that all the tech guys can advise on what you need, what they can leverage as pre-built, 3rd party functionality and what has to be built for you.

Define hosting requirements

Decide if you need to send or receive emails, alerts to mobiles or any other forms of push communication from the site. Decide if you need a database and if you intend to store/send and receive information that has to be encrypted. Finally, in this crazy world, you need to make an early decision to be based on .Net, Java or Flash.

Define availability

What % uptime do you need? How long can you be without your site? Is your content static or dynamic? These will determine how you backup, backup frequency and whether you require mirrored servers and failover capability.

Specify expected volumes

How many visitors daily and how many concurrent users are the two key questions. Start as small as possible but without being in danger of crashing and understand the process whereby you can scale rapidly. Lots of advice out there on sizing algorithms for each area (webserver, DB, app Server) - sizing needs specialist knowledge

Verify Hosting

You have to put your website somewhere. Start by knowing where that is, what it will cost and who looks after it. If an external party then read their SLA. Hosting will be strongly influenced by the work you do in step 1. Make sure your provider (if external) supports the technology and options that you choose. If you are hosting in-house then do you have the licences and certificates (SSL) you need.

Specify standards

Before you start you should say what browsers and versions you will support. The dev and creative work should be tested with the lowest possible version (don't forget to test with Macs!) You also need to decide if your site requires cookies and scripting languages like javascript. It is commonplace these days to refuse access to visitors that will not allow scripting or cookies but you have to do this elegantly, which means knowing you intend to do this from the start.

Produce Search Guidelines

A good site will let you search it. State how you want search to work (if you need it) before you go too far and find that you have restricted your options. This is search on the site, not SEO, which comes later.

Comparative Analysis

Collect samples of sites that you/client like. Approx 10, this will give you inspiration. Do this even if you plan to rehash your existing site. The world moves on and you should know where your site will live in the grand scheme of things when it launches.

Competitive Analysis

Specifically examine competitor sites. No point in building a website that looks like you just copied someone, however inadvertently.

Define Templates (HTML)

Design a minimal set (2-3) of page templates. Templated sites are faster and cheaper to build and easier to roll out and grow.

Define Navigation

Prototype/Select navigation styles for primary, secondary and tertiary navigation. Do this even if you currently don't have levels for tertiary because if you are successful then your site will grow.

Site Architecture

Design site structure and hierarchy - Homepage...Products...Individual Product etc. All pages at the same level in the site should share the same page template. Try to make your site as flat as possible, people really hate drilling down lots of levels to find what they want.

Build Wireframes

Create html wireframes to test navigation and flow. Quick and simple site using text hyperlinks and 'loremipso' copy. This step is very important if you want to have a really top class site. Ask yourself all the time, who is coming here, what do they want, and how do I expect them to get it.

Usability Testing

Test wireframes to prove site is intuitive. You know how it works, which is cheating.

Creative Concepts

Obtain/Produce different creative concepts for the site. Even if you have a strong direction, through this process you may end up with something altogether new.

Anti-bot

We all hate those stupid 'bots written by malware producers. There are a number of techniques that are freely available on the web for not letting those creeps trawl through your website automatically filling out forms and other rubbish. Put those techniques into your code framework right from the start.

Cut Code

You can start cutting code almost as soon as the Tech Architect and the client have defined the system and its uses. There are so many different approaches that this is nothing more than a placeholder so you know roughly when you have to start.

Produce Graphics

Obtain/Produce all graphical elements - buttons, navbars, 3rd party imagery etc. Try to remember that you may have to test different artwork so consider not limiting yourself to one set of all images.

Produce Photos

Different from graphics and is a separate step because if you want to show photos of people or products in the business then you need professionally produced photos (produced specifically for the web)

Style Guide

Get the creative team to specify fonts, colours, everything that goes into the creative aspects of your site(s). If you have any 3rd parties producing material for your site then make sure they have the style guide AND WORK TO IT.

SEO Guidelines

Before you start producing copy you need to consider SEO. Your words need to get you found. Remember that online you are WHAT you say YOU DO, not WHO you say YOU ARE. Consider your keywords and where they appear on your site. Do you have a keyword in the title of your pages for example?

Produce Copy

You may have been doing this from the outset but once you have pages with graphics in place then you need to flesh them out with content. Be very, very SEO conscious in your choice of words. Be brief and to the point and remember a picture really does say a thousand words.

Ts and Cs and Privacy Notices

Your site should always have a Terms and Conditions document and a Privacy statement telling people how you operate online and what you might do with any data you collect about them.

Docs and FAQ's

If you intend to make any docs or other media available on your site then make sure that any links in them still work and are appropriate. Also, if you have done any branding work, check that your docs etc all carry the correct colours and imagery. This can be a big task and is often overlooked.

Curtain Raisers

If you have videos on your site they often look better when they are top and tailed by a branded curtain raiser and finale. These take time to produce. Don't end up looking like a youtube freebie unless that is the specific image of your brand that you want to convey.

Softlaunch

Launch website at temporary location. Do not test an internet site in an intranet location and vice versa. Pay particular attention if your site contains both secure and non-secure content to what happens when you move between the two. Softlaunches are rarely client-friendly first time and even these should be tested.

Review

You may have as many reviews as your site needs but you must have one that goes through the entire site, with all the parties involved in building it. Make sure you test for broken links, browser compatibility, spelling and grammar errors.

Stress Test

If your site is going to receive a lot of visitors then you need to stress test it for the expected volumes. A number of applications exist out there to do this automatically for you. If you are a small company and need to do this on a tight budget then get all the friends and family battering your site.

Launch

Too many people go live on Monday morning. This is wrong! Go live on Saturday afternoon instead. People who pretend that S**t doesn't happen are people who find themselves in it up to their elbows! If you have done your testing on the softlaunch properly then you will have tested the deployment process and this should be a formality.

Retest

You must retest the production site when it is deployed and not rely on the testing of the softlaunch site. Forgetting to copy over a 'piece' of the old site is a common mistake and you want your visitors to have a flawless experience. You must test your backups and failover/load balancing (if you implemented it) as well.