This article is the first article of 30 in my series on Front-End Architecture. The goal with the articles is to document things I have never documented and share knowledge and experience to anyone that are interested in the architectural decisions made.
Get to know your problem domain
Before starting a big redesign you have to identify, quantify and gather data on almost everything that has anything to do with your front-end architecture. What I would do first is to read the requirement specification and business goals for the redesign of the web you are working on. I have seen a lot of requirement specifications and to be honest, I have yet to see a requirement specification that puts front-end requirements clearly. If the requirement specification fails to specify requirements that affect the front-end architecture, I stress the value of creating a pre-study focusing on all the aspects you may think of. Below I list some of the areas I think is crucial to address in a front-end pre-study.
Statistics
How many daily visitors can you expect? What type of clients can you expect visiting your website, instead of looking at the current statistics, look at trends over a period of at least half a year, this way you are sure you will not miss any significant data hiding in the stats.
Performance
If you are redesigning your website, measure everything you can measure and if you are building from scratch, look at competitors as guideline to what you have to achieve at least. Things I would measure is
• HTTP-requests
• Response times
• Render time
• Download size
There are a lot of online tools you could use for measuring stuff like this. Please visit WebSiteOptimization.com
Design Paradigms
Make sure your knowledge is up to date. If you where involved in a bigger redesign 3 years ago, it is probable that there is new knowledge and design paradigms. We had a huge change of design paradigm 4-5 years ago, when the whole industry moved from table-based to css-based design. We are now seeing changes in how we use scripting in webpages with ajax, mashups and external apis. There is no need implementing new stuff, just because you can, but it is important that you expand your knowledge. You never know when you will need that knowledge.
Surveys and Usability Studies
If you need answers to a lot of questions regarding the user interface, there is no such thing as speaking directly to the customers. If you have access to surveys or usability studies, I suggest reading them closely and try to extract everything you think is of importance for the front-end architecture.
Design
Is there any mockups on the upcoming website? Often designers design a mockup for start-up meetings of bigger redesign projects. These designs may say something on what to expect of the design. Is there anything in the design that you think will impose a problem for you?
Other
Depending on your website, the time-frame for the redesign project and other parameters a pre-study may analyze a lot of different aspects of potential issues and possibilities for the front-end architecture.
Deliverables from a Front-End Architecture Pre-Study
Typical deliverables from a pre-study may be recommendation on technical platform, guidelines for the user interface, prototypes of certain business processes, proof-of-concepts on technical solutions.
Next article will focus on the Front-End Platform, and we start with the server side part of the front-end architecture.
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