Why You Should Write Technical Specification

Pretty much any website development starts from writing a technical specification (tech spec). Many customers wonder why they need to provide 10+ pages describing such “obvious” tasks, as development of a “simple support portal”, “just an ordinary online-store”, “not-so-special landing page website” and so on? Let’s find out the answer to this question.

What differentiates your point of view from a technical specification

Majority of customers contacting web developers have an idea of the website they want to get. They have probably seen thousands of different websites in their business niche and can imagine how their website should look and function. 

At the same time, web developers have worked with hundreds of various websites from different business areas and can also imagine an approximate website which may suit a new customer. In other words, we also have our own point of view of the final result. 

And now it becomes obvious that these two points of view of a perspective website may be very different from one another, because a customer has an idea of how the final result should look and function, whereas the developers have their idea of how it should work. 

These two aspects may contradict each other a lot. Hence, technical specification can make the cooperation of seller and buyer a lot better and bring them to the same page by visualizing the final result as precise as possible.

What areas are covered by a technical specification? 

A quality tech spec addresses the following:

• What is going to be on the website? What kind of materials and what types of content are planned to be listed on the website? e.g. pages, articles, news, catalog of products, product items and etc.
• How content will be displayed? What sections and categories are going to be there? How are they going to be connected with the content?
• How visitors will be interacting with the website? What exactly happens when they wander from one page to another? What exactly occurs after visitors click on particular buttons/images/banners? What should be listed on the error pages?
• How the website is going to interact with other sites? Will there be any advertisement on it (what kind of ads and where exactly)? Will the site provide information to other sites (how exactly)?
• To what degree the website should be flexible for its owner? What exactly and how the owner can edit the website?
• How the website should look like? It’s better to provide a separate visual draft for every window, graphic element, button and result of an action. 
• How the website will be developed? A detailed list of tasks for web developers is one of the most important parts of technical specification. It’s better to split the tasks by the stages with separate time terms for each.

Advantages of technical specification for customers:

• It makes a scope of work much clearer in terms of functionality, cost and time required for every area of the website. As a result, a customer will have a great overview of the project and can decide either he/she would like to make changes in it (e.g. eliminating certain tasks or postponing them). 
• Tech spec is also a step-by-step plan, which allows the customer monitoring the progress instead of relying on developers blindly.        
• It reduces extra expenses. Technical specification eliminates a risk of redoing the entire project because the final result has not met the initial expectations. 
• It makes easier to track the deadlines at every development stage. 
• A thoroughly written tech spec can be used as a website documentation, as it includes the structure and functionality of every section.
• It eliminates a risk of missing something on the last stage of approving the project, because a customer will see a full list of tasks planned and completed.

Advantages of technical specification for web developers:

• It reduces a number of questions to the customer and saves time of both parties. It also eliminates additional negotiations throughout the development process and, as a result, saves money of the customer.
• Tech spec allows determining the time required for each stage of development process and distribute them among the staff in advance. Owing to an agreed sequence of stages and tasks in the beginning, web developers can better control their workload.
• It makes the designer’s work dozen times easier because there are no guessing games any longer and the designer has all visual drafts on hand. 
• A quality and detailed tech spec is valuable on its own and can be used for dealing with different web developers in the future.