SEO Ladder

At the start of any project it is best to begin…well…at the beginning. I know that sounds obvious, but for many, the beginning means firing up an editor and churning out code. Not that jumping right into code is wrong, but for me, the beginning means planning and identifying some project requirements. This phase is often overlooked and can be much harder than building the system itself. I must admit, I don’t get excited about requirements gathering but without a true understanding of what you are building, I can almost guarantee you will see problems downstream.

Let’s take a look at my requirements for my web store

The store front I am building is your cookie cutter web store. We plan to sell
various items from various manufactures. We will be targeting a niche home goods
market with a number of existing competitors.

Below are some of the high level functional and non-functional requirements
I came up with:

• The store must have the ability to sell products from different vendors/manufacturers
• The store must have the ability to sell products of various configurations
  (i.e. size -Widget A (Red), Widget A (Blue))
• The store must have the ability to present products by category
• The store must have the ability to be administered externally via a
  web interface.
• The administrative web interface for the store must have the ability
  to control all of the store’s major functions (add/edit/remove products,
  processing orders, managing customer information, etc.)
• The store must have the ability to accept Credit Card and PayPal payments
  from the customer
• The store must run 24/7 with no more than 10% downtime per year
• The store must support secure communication with the customer (i.e.
  SSL)
• 30% of the store’s traffic during the first year will be generated by search engines (organic search traffic). This could be a lofty requirement.
• …there are others but I will spare you from the 300 page spec <kidding>.

I could have also started out by by building a number of use cases that model the business process and derived the requirements from those. Either way, once I have derived a base set of high level requirements I would normally then break down those requirements into a more detailed form but for this project I am satisfied with just a high level set of requirements.

Now that I have a better understanding of what it is I am going to build I am going to move on to the next step: begin on a design…

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