Requirements

Before you begin web site development in earnest, you need to have a definite set of requirements as to what you really need, what you would like, and what you might want in the future.  What you need drives your selection of web site features, web services and all of your design considerations.  In turn the features, services, and design needs you have defined drive your selection of a host that can meet your requirements.

Clear and understandable requirements are the lynch-pin of all successful web sites – knowing what it is you want and planning for it.  Just as you wouldn’t pay a building contractor to “just build a house” without a floor plan and details about what you want, you shouldn’t pay a web developer to build a web site without a plan for what you want.

Sure, sometimes we aren’t sure what we really need, we just have an idea of what we want to do.  So with that in mind, I will be presenting some of the typical features of a web site along with many other topics you should discuss with your web site developer before work starts.

Aside from setting clear requirements, you also have to be careful to set realistic expectations for what you can do based on your available budget.  An unlimited budget with venture capital investors could allow a site capable of handling hundreds of thousands of users who could upload and share in content creation.  Operations on a more modest to shoestring budget usually entail using free services, lower priced shared-hosting with bandwidth and storage limits, and open source software (MySQL versus SQL, for example) to keep costs down.   You can do quite a bit on the cheap with a little creativity and innovation, but there will be some limitations.