This is the most important part of any project. The project goals and acceptence criteria has to be researched, discussed and agreed. This can be punishing work, requiring deep levels of detail and data.

With sufficient detail in the production of the Requirements document it is possible to idenitfy the correct platform. This is done by answering the following questions:

• Which CMS or Ecommerce platform requires the least amount of adaptation to fullfill the demands of the requirements document?
• Which hosting arrangement is best suited to the platform and the anticipated load and traffic?
• Which combination of software and hosting is the most cost effective?
• What are the costs of scaling likely to be in year 2? year n? Is the platform choice future proof?