Information gathering stage
This is all about an involvement of the user to gauge a deep idea of the criteria (applied by the target group in question in) judging how useful a website is and will be.
This criterion can change in all sorts of ways so the main thing is to get a good focus group that represent the target audience type and start to get feedback from them as to what is vital. What is vital is what the end-user would like to see in the site in question.
Here you have to identify the criteria that the group has mentioned and rank that criterion in order of importance. Now you start to get a picture of what is vital to the end-user with regards to your site.
Though a site should built around the use of user interaction and development it's also vital that users of the site that are not considered but may be interested in the content are taken into consideration so areas like structure should be geared on the homogeneous side.
A general criterion that is looked for for most sites in general is the following (these elements of course would fluctuate in terms of importance but this is a very good guide to start with):
Use
Content
Linkage
Search
Appearance
