Functional Requirements Site Content Creating a Website

¶ … Functional Requirements

Site Content

Creating a website that can guide potential customers through the purchasing process for a build-to-order tablet PC needs to have a unified, highly integrated content management strategy that supports each phase of the buying cycle. The intent of this chapter is to define the site content and grouping by clarifying content elements, functional requirements and overall content inventory. Pervading both online and offline sales channels is the need for consistently excellent content to support each phase of the sales process (Forsyth, 2004). That is the objective of this chapter, to define those content elements and their contributing to moving customers through the buying cycle (Kumar, 2007).

The value proposition for the proposed build-to-order tablet is predicated on giving customers control over the experience their devices deliver daily. The site content needs to underscore the agility and flexibility of the production process while also showing the stability and strength of the core components that are used for creating the tablet PC. The majority of content will be digital, as it allows for greater use of analytics and predictive modeling. Digital content is giving marketers the ability to move at a much faster pace than has been the case in the past, providing greater levels of analytical insight and intelligence on how to better streamline the purchasing process (Rowley, 2008).

3.1

Site Content and Grouping

The content on the website is grouped by static, dynamic, functional and transactional roles as they relate to the website's contribution to the buying cycle. Static content needs to be kept at a minimum to keep the website agile enough to respond to prospective customers' changing information needs and direction of the buying cycle. HTML is often used for these areas of content and is by nature difficult to change. The placeholder's of the site and standard text defining the company, which will not change over time, need to be defined with these technologies.

Dynamic content that can quickly be personalized to the specific needs of a visitor through personalization technologies including cookies. Just as the build-to-order tablet PC will have a high degree of personalization provided, the website and its content must also reflect this attribute. The actual product configurator, its surrounding content and option selections, the specials shown on the site, and the pricing tables based on customer profile all need to be dynamically defined. This content will also change rapidly to drive up search engine optimization (SEO) as Google and other algorithms rely on frequency of content updates to drive up search results by keyword (Rowley, 2008).

The functional content will include the relatively stable areas of product features and data sheets of the baseline configurations, and the customer success stories of companies who have standardized on the build-to-order tablet PC. These will become an increasingly important area of the site as it will show the credibility and trustworthiness of the build-to-order tablet PC to consumers and enterprise alike.

The transactional content will be designed to support the product configurator workflows and the options that prospective customers choose as they progress through the website. This transactional content will be customizable through the use of personalization technologies, in addition to providing prospects with the chance to log in and save configurations on their account. The transactional content will also be designed to initiate and maintain conversations on social networks, further promoting the company's brand over time. This will be accomplished through the use of social media integration to ensure seamless sharing across Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other forms of social media content.

3.2

Functional Requirements

Based on an analysis of the content requirements for the website, the following functional requirements are defined:

1. Product configurator workflows and ease of product configuration

a. Content to guide product selection decisions critical

b. Support for system and application software customization

i. Static content for workflows, dynamic content for new tablets

2. Trust in the product configuration process and components being used

a. Content and graphics showing how the configuration process works

b. Dynamic content that automatically restricts and shows the options of the tablet PC based on previous selections of the configuration process

3. Customer validation

a. User-generated content section that shows how customers are getting value out of their tablet PCs and how they are streamlining their lifestyles and making them more efficient

b. Customer testimonials in the form of videos (both from them and also professionally produced)