Designing the Blog, Chapter 1: Determining Your Site Objectives
If you haven’t already, you might like to read the introduction to this series.
Before considering our user needs, it is worth setting down the objectives of the site. As with any project, some critical success factors must be established at the beginning in order to determine whether we have been successful in developing what we set out to.
Expressed at its most simple, the objective of the site can be summarised as:
To provide a place for the author to document personal and professional issues, and publish articles on web design and development
Sounds fairly simple, right? Let’s break it down a little.
A common axiom among project folk is that objectives must be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely – so I’ll try to define some SMART objectives that enhance our overall site objective.
- The site will be accessible to users on all common browsers and platforms.
- The site will be built using standards compliant XHTML and CSS, together with Javascript and PHP.
- The site will be accessible to disabled users, and comply with WCAG as far as possible.
- The site will allow the author to publish material remotely and separately from the underlying code (yep, that means a content management or blogging system of some kind).
- The site will facilitate interaction between site visitors, probably by way of a commenting system.
- The site will include many common ‘widgets’ to aid site use, such as a search facility, print-friendly pages, clean URLs, etc.
Okay, that last one’s a little bit vague – we’re starting to get into the functional specification arena with a widget wishlist, so I’ll stop there.
Right – Critical Success Factors. You shouldn’t really need more than two or three CSFs, and definitely no more than six – if you’ve got lots, they’re probably not all critical. If we fail to satisfy these statements, the development has failed – that’s what critical means!
A common CSF in web design/development is “must drive [more] traffic”. This is not relevant to a site like a blog, where it is the content that drives the traffic, so I’ll confine myself to CSFs relevant to the redevelopment project.
CSF1: The site must ‘work’ – i.e. look and operate as intended – on all modern browsers/platforms.
CSF2: The site must be easy to maintain and update.
CSF3: The content must be ‘findable’, both from within and outside the site itself.
Next – Chapter 2: Establishing User Needs.
Filed under: Designing the Blog.
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Previously: Useful links
Next: Redesign