Commercial Web Site Development

Published on May 2016 | Categories: Documents | Downloads: 31 | Comments: 0 | Views: 237
of 31
Download PDF   Embed   Report

Comments

Content

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** COMMERCIAL WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT ***

For e-business Strategy class < Michal Kasprowicz >

Analysis written by: < Georgi Butev >

Start Date: < 28 January 2008 >

Due Date: < 26 March 2008 >

Page ‫ 1 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Table of Contents ***
Web site development welcome text terms and conditions intellectual property products description post-sale relationship Market Research school environment friends and family peers accidental visitors find and describe competition SWOT analysis Financial planning and budgeting resources time money Marketing planning and visitors tracking marketing activities google analytics Launching the web site beta-testing bugs Planing sales forecast end-result Marketing activities Weekly analysis presentation Conclusion Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3 Appendix 4 | 3

|

8

|

10

|

13

|

16

|

18

| | | | | | |

19 20 21 28 29 30 31

Page ‫ 2 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Web Site Development ***
Web development is a broad term for any activities related to developing a web site for the World Wide Web or an Intranet. This can include e-commerce business development, web design, web content development, client-side/server-side coding, and web server configuration. However, among web professionals, "web development" usually refers only to the non-design aspects of building web sites, e.g. writing mark-up and coding. Web development can range from developing the simplest static single page of plain text to the most complex web-based internet applications, electronic businesses, or social network services. Web developing can be split into several important areas: 1. 2. 3. 4. HTML CSS JavaScript Flash

Initial
The usage of JavaScript and Flash was not implemented because we didn't have anyone enough experienced person amongst the team to work with the technology. To link the two polls and e-cards sections (two main commercial sections of the site) I was assigned to develop a home page which would have links to the rest of the web site. I decided to use a popular and appropriate web site template which I will later edit and re-design to fit the purposes of the assignment. Here is the the link where you can find the original design by Andreas Vinklund - < http://andreasviklund.com/templates/ >

Page ‫ 3 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

Final HTML + CSS designed web page

Further editing
Finishing the page coding was half the work done because there had to be additional editing done not so much in the design but rather what the clients see first. Below are the areas I and the rest of the team worked on. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. welcome text terms and conditions about intellectual property product description post-sale relationship

Welcome text
My initial idea of what the welcome text was to write something about me, the team, the project and Prague College. After a discussion in the class I understood that a welcome text should be a mini-marketing idea something like a slogan, banner or a company logo.

Page ‫ 4 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

Since we didn't have a company logo or banner we decided to write an ad text that would best describe the product and our goal in a client's friendly manner. Oliver said that there shouldn't be any text because the visitors wouldn't bother to read it anyway. To which I partly agree because I think there should be at least something there.

Terms and conditions
I formed my suggestion of useful terms and services policy based on what other common web sites have done. I have deleted the useless parts and add some parts that are particularly useful to us - like the part where the web site should be treated according to the EU law. The full text of which can be found here - < http://ecommerce.ic.cz/terms-g.html >

About
We had to compile and write something for the About section. I thought that writing of us and what we do is already done on the home page. That's why I decided to write an explanation of how e-cards work. With a simple intro and five step simplified approach. The full text of which can be found here - < http://ecommerce.ic.cz/about-g.html >

Intellectual Property
Intellectual property (IP) is a legal field that refers to creations of the mind such as musical, literary, and artistic works; inventions; and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce, including copyrights, trademarks, patents, and related rights. Under intellectual property law, the holder of one of these abstract "properties" has certain exclusive rights to the creative work, commercial symbol, or invention which is covered by it. To be in accordance with EU and US law the easiest way I thought was to include the name and additional information about the author of a certain copyrighted material on the web site. I have done so in two places: 1. the web page template on the very first page there is a link to the web site of the author of template I redesigned for out home page. 2. e-cards images there were few copyrighted images that I used in the electronic cards section. I listed the authors and gave them credit on the same page.

Page ‫ 5 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

Product description
The product description is usually a welcome text and a brief explanation of functionality. In our case we had covered pretty much everything in the welcome text. In addition we didn't have to do any marketing tricks and cool attractive overviews of the service we offer because using electronic cards and voting in polls is pretty straight forward.

Post-sales relationship
Post sale relationship is the piece of thank we give to our clients for participating and above all using our service. In our case we felt that a simple thank you for your purchase is perfectly fine. However towards the end of the class I understood that such a relationship is not only a casual thanks but really a further business strategy to lure clients to come back to the web site. If we had the time to do it I believe we could have implemented a newsletter function. This means that whenever a client sends an e-card we would store his / her e-mail in the database a send him / her newsletter emails. These emails will notify the client of new features, images, polls, design and others with which we can tempt him or her to come back and use our service again. Thus not only generating a bigger income of visitors and establishing ourselves but maybe a bigger profit.

The polls
Everyone of the team had to create at least three polls. Below are my ideas: 1. Why George Bush invaded Iraq? I was hoping to attract people's attention by provocation.

2. What comes first? (egg or chicken) This is a centuries old question which everyone loves so I thought I clients will love it.

Page ‫ 6 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy 3. What is your favourite Czech beer? We study in the Czech Republic and our clients mostly come from the same place so I thought such a question would interest them and spark a discussion with their friends which can also come to the web site.

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

Pilsner Staropramen Gambrinus Budwar Frisco Kelt

I think that I did come up with interesting and entertaining questions. The others from the team did so too. The total votes that my polls received was average which is good in my opinion. The most voted question was Where would you like to live? which tips my mind that our customers were mostly international and they were interested in questions like that.

The electronic cards
An e-card is similar to a postcard or greeting card, with the primary difference being it is created using digital media instead of paper or other traditional materials. E-cards are made available by publishers usually on various Internet sites, where they can be sent to a recipient, usually via email. E-cards are digital "content", which makes them much more versatile than traditional greeting cards. As with the polls everyone had to create a category and upload some electronic cards. I decided to be a bit more experimental, open-minded and funny. That's why I created one category called beers and one category called crazy animals. After some thinking about it I may have been wrong about the beer category because people send cards to their friends of places and unseen things. However one of my cards is among the most popular sent electronic cards from the web site. The reason why I created the crazy animals category was because I thought it would be great fun and rather hilarious to send pets doing shenanigans rather than sending some boring scapes of a green fields or grey castles.

beer e-card Page ‫ 7 ٭‬

crazy animals e-card Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Market Research ***
Market research is the process of systematically gathering, recording and analysing data and information about customers, competitors and the market. Its uses include to help create a business plan, launch a new product or service, fine tune existing products and services, and expand into new markets. Market research can be used to determine which portion of the population will purchase a product/service, based on variables like age, gender, location and income level. To properly determine what audience we should target each one of us was asked to do a presentation and include his / her opinions about it. The presentation includes the following topics: 1. friends & family 2. peers 3. accidental visitors 4. additional information What I didn't include in the presentation at the time was competition and SWOT analysis. Both of them are extremely important to the market research process. Some companies even employee people to constantly snoop and monitor the activities of the competitors. Our case was a bit different because our project was a college one but since we all dealt with the same thing free ecards I had to look at what the other guys are doing.

Competition
Major alternatives for sending electronic cards are (note that searching on the internet for such service is tricky because there are more than 6 million such web sites. The few listed below support English language and have similar goal):

Blue Mountain Hallmark 123 greetings eGreetings Card Fountain

Page ‫ 8 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

SWOT analysis
From my personal journal dating 30th of February. After the official launch of the web site we decided that monitoring our e-commerce web site with the help of Google Analytics is a good idea. It will show us who our customers are, where they come from, and what time do they spend on the site. The result was somewhat unsurprising - only we have used the web site and its service. That's why we decided to apply SWOT analysis. Unfortunately the group found more weaknesses than strengths. Below were my suggestions: S --- content, professional approach. W --- design, lack of brand, back-up. O --- ... T --- competitors, sensitive customers, bad hosting service. The rest of the group thought of other S - free service, simplicity, and pioneering. As for Weaknesses - limited time and resources. They saw lots of O to which I can't fully agree because of the type of the project (school) and the economic / political environment (CZ / EU). At the end Prof. Alexander surprised us by dropping failure as a potential Treat. We discussed whether or not we can fix some of our weaknesses. Apparently the limited time and resources cannot be fixed but some of the lucky ones were - design, brand and back-up. I agree that backing-up is accomplished but I hardly see any volunteers to invest time in a new web design and money in better name.

Page ‫ 9 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Financial Planning and Budgeting ***
Financial planning is the task of determining how a business will afford to achieve its strategic goals and objectives. Usually, a company creates a Financial Plan immediately after the vision and objectives have been set. The Financial Plan describes each of the activities, resources, equipment and materials that are needed to achieve these objectives, as well as the time frames involved. Usually a financial plan consist of: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Assessment of business environment Confirm the business vision and objectives Identify the types of resources needed to achieve the objectives Quantify the amount of resources (labor, equipment, materials) Calculate the total cost of each type of resource Summarise the costs to create a budget Identify any risks and issues with the budget set

However in a project like ours there are three main areas to discuss: 1. available resources 2. time left 3. money matters

Available resources
All the available resource we could use were mainly software, hardware and personal skills related: 1. Software: ○ Windows XP, Mac OS X and Ubuntu GG (Linux) ○ Microsoft Office and Open Office ○ Adobe imaging software used for making and editing images ○ Firefox, Opera and IE internet browsers ○ Fire FTP used to connect and transfer data with the host server ○ PS Pad used to connect, transfer and edit PHP and HTML files on the host server

Page ‫ 01 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

2. Hardware ○ Computers ○ Colour printers 3. Skills ○ web development is essential but common skill amongst the team. ○ business experience is essential but only one team member was comfortable with it. ○ marketing experience is of great importance unfortunately as far as I can tell few of us knew what it means and how it should be applied.

Time left
Time is always important for electronic businesses. The minimal time to develop an e-commerce web site is about an year. Sometimes six months are need for web site build, additional three months are needed for the first order and more three months to pick-up a pace. We had two months top. In that time we had to build the web site, market it and get a steady pace of visitors. Below I've listed some of the more important activities: * create e-cards section * create polls section * create home page * send e-mails to friends * promote in social web site * promote in IMs, blogs and forums * marketing campaign

* analyse results * pick-up steady pace

1 month

15 days

15 days

2 months total

Page ‫ 11 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

Money matters
In order to start a business electronic or not the team should prepare a budget which to follow if they want to be successful. In case of miscalculating the budgeting the company will have to step out of business, the team will have to be fired and the project will fail. We have agreed on the following budget: Products beer cards cars cards crazy animals flowers places sport swiss world capitals votes Cost of technical implementation and maintenance: Action Programming Design Domain and hosting Marketing Wages The result and break even point are discussed in the conclusion chapter. Price in Czech Crowns (Kc) 30 000 once & 5 000 25 000 once 5 000 monthly 5 000 monthly 20 000 per employee Prices in Czech Crowns (Kc) 100 80 95 110 80 90 75 85 200

Page ‫ 21 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Marketing Planning and Visitors Tracking ***
A marketing plan is a written document that details the necessary actions to achieve one or more marketing objectives. It can be for a product or service, a brand or a product line. A marketing plan may a part of an overall business plan. Solid marketing strategy is the foundation of a well-written marketing plan. While a marketing plan contains a list of actions, a marketing plan without a sound strategic foundation is of little use.

Market Audit
The first step in the marketing planning process is that of conducting the marketing audit. The materials collected for the audit come from: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Who are the customers? What are their characteristics? What differentiate them from other customers? What are their needs? What do they expect product to do? What are their attitudes? What are their buying intentions?

Visitors Tracking
The way to find out the answer to those questions in electronic business visitors tracking is applied. This sometimes is referred to as web analytics. Web analytics is the study of the behaviour of web site visitors. In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which aspect of the website work towards the business objectives. We employed two methods of collecting such data: 1. Google analytics 2. Web page log (for electronic cards)

Page ‫ 31 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

Google analytics
Google analytics is web based software that when implemented in one's web site tracks mostly anything that the visitor, customer does. Below I've listed few of the benefits that convinced us to use it in our electronic business web site: 1. Free 2. Sophisticated analytics collects huge amount of data and then presents it to the user in a pleasant easy to understand manner. 3. Easy to use 4. Scalable for any size site. 5. Integrated with Adwords 6. Tracks all campaigns 7. Safe Above all of course we needed to collect relevant data from our visitors. Here are some of the most important, used and analysed data from our Google analytics account. 1. Visitors overview 2. Visitors map overlay 3. Visitors site usage 4. New and Returning visitors 5. Visitors language 6. Count of unique visitors 7. Count of page views 8. Count of the spend time on the web site by visitors. 9. Visitors loyalty 10. Depth of visit 11. Various data like: ○ internet browsers ○ operating systems ○ flash and Java support ○ connection speed 12. Traffic sources 13. Content visited 14. Content drill down 15. Bounce rate 16. Goals

Page ‫ 41 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

Using this functionality offered by Google analytics we found out some interesting information about our visitors / customers, such as:
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Visitors mainly come from the Czech Republic and Mexico. There is an equal ration between new comers and returning visitors. English and Spanish are the languages most of our clients speak. The time spend on the web site was a 5 minute average. We had low bounce rate. The loyalty of our visitors was poor. They were interested to visit the site once. The visitors visited up to three pages. Mostly used internet browsers were Internet Explorer and Firefox. Mostly used operating systems were Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Our users have broadband internet connection. The visitors first vote, then send an e-card and then read the about' and 'terms of service'.

Server Log
Both of our web applications (polls and ecards) had an incorporated tracking script which log visitors activities and then presented the gathered data to us. With the help of those scripts we were able to measure the success of our products and decide which one to leave, which one to edit / redesigned and which one to remove all together. Below are some of the findings we stumbled upon and were important to know: ● Total cards sent / polls voted ● Cards sent / Polls votes this week ● Most popular cards / polls ● Most popular categories

Evaluate marketing strategy
Based on that findings we could successfully implement and develop our marketing strategy: 1. Products ○ developing new products ○ adding new features ○ changing the design 2. Price ○ budgeting ○ deciding how to meet competitive pricing. Page ‫ 51 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Launching the Web Site ***
Without a doubt developing an electronic business web site such as ours takes a lot of time but there are aspects of it that sometimes are not being notices until the official launch of the web site. These aspects turn into bugs and issues for most of the time. And these issues may not only harm the web site but the whole business too. For example if we have problems with our electronic payment method we would loose the trust of our clients and ultimately the company's 'name' will suffer. In order to deal with an unexpected issues the web site is tested by each and everyone of us and a critical feedback is gathered. We divided the testing of the web site into three categories just for effectiveness sake. They are as follows: ● design ● functionality ● content We decided to discuss the web site little foibles in class and act on issues rather than writing lengthy time consuming documents that need to be gathered and analysed.

Design
There's a general dissatisfaction with the web design of the three main pages. The polls are a bit too old-fashioned looking, the e-cards script was a bit too grey and the background of the home page was a bit too colourful. As a result of a discussion I slightly altered the design of the home page and the polls section was refreshed with another more pleasant and appropriate web application. Unfortunately the e-cards script was not changed and it is still grey and a bit gloomy. The reason why this issues was not dealt with is because of resource and time limitations.

Page ‫ 61 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

Functionality
The biggest complain about the functionality of the web site came from dissatisfaction with the ecards site. Not to forget though is that we postponed the official web site launch because the voting section of the web site didn't behave properly. Another major caveat was that the link representing the electronic card was not working because we didn't configure the script in relation to the host server (ecommerce.ic.cz). Fortunately we dealt successfully with the problems and fixed the issues.

Content
There isn't any beta testing of content but rather a review of what is written and whether it is appropriate for the web site and for the outlined business purposes. One of the main issue that the team heatedly discussed was the following question.

The argument was that a lot of Americans live in Prague and they may find it offensive. Even though the question is controversial and may spark a lot of interest it is a bit risky. The end result of the discussion was that the question will promote more visits and customers. Even if some visitors wouldn't like the poll they will be few. That was actually proven by Google analytics which showed that we have little visits from the U.S. As a creator of the question I believe it is more fun and the targeted audience will like it. Of course this is based on the research I did on the targeted audience.

Page ‫ 71 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Planning Sales ***
Planning the sales seems to be the easiest activity as far as I can tell. Firstly because one estimates how many products will be bought. It is easier for me or the others to just tell a figure but they should be based on certain information about our clients. What's more giving just a number will not help the team to plan the budget. And if the team of economist do not have a realistic image of sales they do not know how to form the budget. And if the budgeting is unclear than the company will most probably fail. Fortunately we have Google analytics on our side which will help us with the estimation. Tracking visitors, their actions and the sales. This means that we would have a real-time log but not a longterm prediction. However there is certain trend, peaks and lows and just a normal pace of the visitors and sales. The class decided that at the of the class we will have more than 100 sales.

The count of sales at the end of the class was more than 150 sales. We had clearly underestimated our sales. The reason for this is that we based our forecast on personal assumption. To see that there is more professional, accurate and trusted forecast I had to calculate the sales based on the following formula, which returned the following result: The result shows that we should plan a bigger budget because in the future we'll have more sales which mean more revenue. visits per day = x peaks once a month = a lows once a moth = b forecast = y

x = 10 a = 20 b=5 y = x*30 + a - b

y = 315 Page ‫ 81 ٭‬ Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Marketing Activities ***
Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer demands profitability. It means put yourself in the customer's shoes but not forget to look at the current market. The main marketing activity one should undertake is connection and chat with people, peer, friends and family about the product one is offering. In that sense I told some of my friends and members of my family about the web site I am a team of and what we are doing. I tried to get them as interested in the product as I can. The main issue for me here is that selling your services and products to your best mates is unethical and unprofessional. For example if you sell cars how many of your friends and family members will be interested? Not much that is for sure. That is why there are other marketing activities that one should take in mind for making his or her electronic business popular. ● Posters ● E-Mail Spam ● Leaflets / Flyers ● Newsletter ● Blogs ● IM-ing ● Forums ● E-Mails ● Radio ● Television ● Press ● Special events ● Freebies ● Promotions ● Balloons and other related goods. I didn't send any emails or spam to my friends because I think it is a bit unethical but I created a poster which a hang at the second floor where I hoped student will see and participate. I also did some blog and forum campaign where I tried to promote our web site. The posters are appended at the end.

Page ‫ 91 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Weekly Analysis Presentation ***

follow the attachment

Page ‫ 02 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Conclusion ***
This chapter is a summary of the commercial web site development project analysis. I look at each phase of the development process and evaluate whether we had accomplished success or we have failed. At the end I write of possible improvements and suggestions.

Web Site Dev
Design I think that the design of the web site was well discussed and appropriately tuned where needed. The home page that I created complies with the W3C standards for HTML and CSS coding. The graphics are not overwhelming and the overall look of things is simple, clear and straight to the point. My suggestion is that with enough time and participation the design of the electronic cards section and polls section can be freshened-up a little bit. As there are more young customers visiting the web site we should use popular Web 2.0 colour palate. Welcome text I am afraid that even though we spent a lot of time discussing and editing the welcome text it is not particularly accurate and useful. It even fails to comply with the SEO analysis. I think that the problem is the uneven and odd fusion between the three main pages of the web site. From a SEO point of view we can put everything on the first home page but that wouldn't be ecstatically pleasing and a bit of a mess which would irritate the visitors. Product description The problems that we had with the welcome text fell upon the product description, too. It is at best ill written and doesn't make much sense. It doesn't matter if it is 2 bullet points or 5 paragraphs of text the issues will still remain. If it is too short it's not professional. On the other hand if it is long no one will ever read it. Making it fun and entertaining doesn't inspire much confidence either. As a suggestion of how to possibly improve both the welcome text and product description I think that we should have placed two illustrated images showing the polls and e-cards. fail success

Page ‫ 12 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy About and terms and conditions

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

I genuinely believe that we did good job in creating both. The about section has all the information the visitor would need to know about / contact us. The terms and condition are always a legal precaution but I think our visitors won't be bored reading them because the terms are straight to the point and include all the necessary legal cases. If by some unfortunate happening a visitor wants to sue us I would be glad to present the terms of service in the court. As a suggestion I think we may put some striped-down version of both the about and terms section on the home page. Thus people will ignore them less. Intellectual property All the materials that are available on the web site are credited. Some more apparent other not so but if someone wants to see the author and intellectual rights owner of a certain art piece he or she will most certainly find it. For example the home page original design is done by a Swedish web designer named Vikund. He's name and website are in footer of the first page. We can slightly improve the way credit is given to the creators of the electronic cards by putting a bare noticeable watermark with the name of the author on the e-cards. Post-sales relationship I afraid we failed to establish a good, perspective and professional post-sales relationship with our clients. There is no rewarding statement when a visitor is voting in the polls section. In the e-cards section they are presented with a dry thank you . That's why I think we should have invested more time writing effective and entertaining thank you statements in both sections. What's more we could establish a professional electronic business relationship with our clients by sending them newsletters.

fail Page ‫ 22 ٭‬

success

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy The e-cards

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

Contrary to the believe I had at the beginning of the class the e-cards were more time consuming and boring than the polls were. Even though we spent great amount of effort in finding and uploading electronic cards to the web site we somehow missed the point. The offered rival e-card services had categories like holidays, birthday, smiley's, animation, fun etc. We on the other hand have beer, cars, sports, flowers etc. I'm not saying that people don't send pictures of beautiful flowers amongst themselves but usually people send exotic sceneries and hilarious type of post and electronic cards. Another issues was sending process which was a bit time consuming, sluggish, slow and some times not working properly. Of course this was due to the fact that the PHP script was free of charge and yet there was negative feedback and complains received from Oliver. Such an issues should have been immediately dealt with and fixed. more cards: * fun / joke like * exotic places My Suggestion

The polls I am rather satisfied with the polls and voting section contrary to my initial assumption. My initial assumption was that the polls will be boring political like. But as it turns the team was creative thinking and was able to come with great, fun, controversial, dreamy and entertaining polls that people would like. It is a general saying that marketing makes people do what they don't need or feel like doing. However this was not the case with the polls because I myself enjoyed voting the polls looking for what other people said about a certain topic.

My Suggestion

Polls with questions that people generally wish and dream about Like our popular question where would you like to live? Page ‫ 32 ٭‬

Polls with question that people heatedly discuss. In other words controversial ones. Like my poll about George Bush and Iraq. Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

Market Research
Presentation (findings) I don't think we failed finding out who our audience and visitors will be but more research should have been applied. My presentation was insufficient providing the real look over what market we are dealing with. It is like shooting a fish in a barrel you know it's there but it takes you a long time to shoot it and the business (water) may run out. There is no other possible suggestion here except that the team should have collected more information and share their findings with the class. Competition Our main goal wasn't to become world leader in sending electronic cards, our goal was to create a web site competitive enough in a face to face comparison. I think we did spend quite a lot of time building the web site and as far as functionality sake is concerned I think we are competitive with the medium-sized rival companies. We should have pursued the team's great idea of putting videos and flash animation as electronic cards. Not only the web site would be more fun and exiting but it would be more competitive. SWOT analysis I have mixed feelings about the SWOT analysis we applied to our on-line business. On one hand we did great job of analysing our business strengths and weaknesses. We successfully determined the possible threats that can fail the company and we successfully determined our future possibilities for becoming a world wide used web site with millions of visitors. Unfortunately we did little of dealing with our weaknesses, avoiding the threats and developing the full potential of the web site (opportunities). I've compiled a small list showing what we expected and what we did about it.
● ● ●

W design, lack of brand and back-up data --- these have not been tackled. T competitors, sensitive customers and bad hosting service --- these haven't been fixed. O we didn't plan becoming world leader in electronic cards sending services.

fail Page ‫ 42 ٭‬

success

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy My suggestion are as follows:


Assignment 1: commercial web site development











Design if our budget allows it we should invest in an experienced web designer who would re-design the whole web site and give it more freshness and modernness. Lack of brand many companies are what they are because of their well known brand. We should too invest in a better name for our web site and name of the company. Obviously ecommerce is far too ubiquitous but crazy cards for instance sounds better. Back-up data usually implementing a back-up data application costs hundreds of dollars but in our case we could have been doing it ourselves. Just connect to the host server, select all, copy and paste in one's personal computer documents. Competitors without a doubt we need a lot of time and experience to rival the big companies but applying a SEO will help us hold-up our position on the market. Sensitive customers a message should have been put in the polls section saying that all the questions are just for fun and they are not meant to upset or offend anyone. If the visitors can't take a joke they shouldn't be looking. Bad hosting service is in my opinion related to back-up sensitive data. The time we would spend in manually backing-up the web site is justified compared with the problems and fuzz we would have if some hacker would purge all our data from the host server.

Financial Planning and Budgeting
Resources The hardware and software resources were absolutely sufficient and satisfying to our needs throughout the development of the web site. The computers and software that we used was able to provide the content to a broad audience without having to worry about accessibility. The only aspect we had with resources was skilled workers . Majority of the team study in IT Computing and only one member was actively involved with marketing and business. In order to stay competitive we need to hire staff experienced in the business area. Time Although we didn't have sufficient time to finish the development of the web site to the point where only maintenance is needed I think we allocated the time we had properly. We didn't waste our team members time with tasks too time consuming that will be of little impact on our on-line business.

fail Page ‫ 52 ٭‬

success

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy Money

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

Our poor performance with budgeting, profit and revenue is because we are small start-up company just emerging ready to take on the competition but not quite there. Nevertheless such a poor record would not only mean that the company can't pay bills and wages to its employees. It also means that we will run out of business if some extreme measures are not being undertaken. The following is a short representation of our sales: formula sales of electronic cards sales of polls total sales visits * average price of cards votes * price sale of e-cards + sales of polls revenue per month 150 * 89.75 = 13'462.5 Kc 100 * 200 = 20'000 Kc 33'462.5 Kc

I calculated that our monthly dues are:
● ● ● ●

bills = 115'000 Kc monthly wage per person = 20'000 Kc monthly wage per 5 people = 100'000 Kc total amount of money spend for a month = 235'000 Kc

It is more than clear that with such revenue we can only pay-up one of our team member. We cannot pay neither the bills nor the wages. There cannot be any other solution to this problem than to increase the sales to a certain value called break even point. There is no possible way we can reach that point with those sales figure but if we have:

* 500 sales of polls * 1000 sales of e-cards

brake even point

Page ‫ 62 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy Visitors tracking

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

The success in visitors tracking was largely due to the usage of Google analytics. This wonderful tool that requires 5 minutes installation, logs everything possible about our visitors and presents it in a clear and easy to understand manner. At the beginning I was a bit specious how a free tool can be so effective but Google plays huge part of electronic business and should not be underestimated. The e-cards and polls statistics script was of great benefit to our client analysis, too. For example we saw that the category place was popular and Oliver added another category with pictures of Switzerland. Another example from the polls section is that I saw the interest in general questions like what's your favourite colour? and I went and created another poll of general interest - what come first the egg or the chicken? . Launching the web site After two unsuccessful launches of the web site we finally officially started business. This was only possible and acceptable because it was a college project but in a real environment such a delay is not acceptable at all. For example if there was an investor that trusted us to start making money tomorrow but we go on business two weeks later the investor will take out his / her capital. Even though we fixed vital functionality issues others remain like the gloomy design and random content. That doesn't mean of course that we should postpone the launch of a web site any time we run into trouble. First because no money flow into the bank account when the web site isn't working. Second because we found out about the issues later and there are always content and functionality to change, edit and enhance. Planning sales We successfully planned and estimated the amount of sales. To be honest I so much underestimated the service that I was thinking of 20 sales total. After some discussion with the team we agreed on a 100 sales total. Something unrealistic for me at the time but despite the odds we managed to pull more than hundred sales for less than two months. Without a doubt this was contributed by Oliver and his friends worldwide. I wasn't that keen on spamming my friends but maybe in the world of business one should swallow his / her ethical dilemmas if he or she wants ultimate success.

fail Page ‫ 72 ٭‬

success

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Appendix 1*** < journals > follow the attachment

Page ‫ 82 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Appendix 2 *** < market research presentation > follow the attachment

Page ‫ 92 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Appendix 3 *** < posters > follow the attachment

Page ‫ 03 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

e-business Strategy

Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** Appendix 4 *** < terms of service > follow the attachment

Page ‫ 13 ٭‬

Georgi Butev

Sponsor Documents

Or use your account on DocShare.tips

Hide

Forgot your password?

Or register your new account on DocShare.tips

Hide

Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link to create a new password.

Back to log-in

Close