Choosing the Features for a Website Release

Choosing the Features for Phase 1

Assuming that you are sold on the phased release approach, your next question is "how do I pick which features to roll out in Phase 1?" That is a great question and it will depend on what things you think are most important to your business' and website's success.

There are a few tips I can give you about this with the help of an analogy... When building a house, installing the kitchen, before the foundation is completed, is not an option.

One reason why so many website and software products fail or end up being maintenance disasters, is that people don't apply the same rules to building websites as they do to houses. It's understandable because building the foundation costs money and takes time and in the end you really don't feel like it does that much for you - so if you can skip it and get to the cool stuff, why not...

So, what is the equivalent of a "foundation" on a website? Depending on the specifics of the site's functionality it could be debatable but I think that it is either the content management system (CMS) or the database design, or both.

For this reason, as far as development work is concerned for Phase 1, I recommend focusing on getting a solid CMS installed and operating. If you have a lot of data that you want to present or collect on the website, then you should also focus on building a flexible and stable database system to manage your information.