Upgrading your website: Documenting Site Features
You’re well on our way to upgrading your website. We’ve figured out your SMART website goals, your main user groups and you’ve written your user stories.
So now it’s time to start thinking about what features you want for your new website. At this stage, we’re looking to capture high-level functional requirements you expect from any future web platform.
Your site feature list will be formed from the user stories created in the previous step which should have included all areas of your business.
Once you have your feature list, if you’re not sure on how to prioritise them, it may be helpful to get your colleagues to vote on the most important elements in their respective areas.
Be mindful of who you’re asking to vote on which area of the list. You wouldn’t have your IT team voting on your customer management. Similarly, you wouldn’t have your marketing team voting on the server or email configuration features.
Gathering different inputs from different people will give you a broader picture of the scale of change needed. Your team can highlight issues or ways to simplify tasks that are important to their role.
When someone has had to find a workaround to a problem that affects their day to day tasks, it isn’t something they’ll broadcast every time it happens — you may not even know about it yet.
They’ll silently grumble at the website not being fit for purpose often muttering words such a ‘stupid’ or ‘piece of junk’ under their breath.
By giving them the opportunity to input into the feature list, you’ll learn more about everyone’s pain points of your current site and what needs improving to make your website easier to maintain, manage and use.
Creating your list
We’ve created an initial list of common site features we find most websites require. This list is by no means exhaustive and some elements may not be relevant to your business (We’ve included some eCommerce features too!). This is a great starting list that you can tailor to your business from the information you’ve gained from your user stories.
