Website development

Assignment Taken

As part of the business expansion plan, the IT department of the startup has taken the task of designing the website for it.

Case Understanding

In its plan to expand the company board wants to become the market leader in the “ short-range drone-based services” segment. The current problems identified about the IT department are: • No online presence of the company and its products • No website or mobile application so that the users or the businesses can avail the services that the startup has to offer • Management Information System not in place to collect, collate and analyze the transactional data

BCS Solution Summary

After reading the case, it is clear that the business is in expansion mode and wants to venture into “short-range drone-based services” and wants to become a market leader in that segment. To support the expansion plan the IT department can plan to develop a website for the company which can handle all the delivery and order-related day-to-day tasks. The website in consideration can have the following features: • Product catalog along with its pricing • User dashboard • Payment interface • Feedback and review section • Ordering gateway • Order tracking system • Robust Database Management System • Implementing Business Intelligence tools like Tableau, Power BI, etc.

Solution

The steps involved a building a new startup website like us are:

• Obtaining a good domain name - The domain name, also known as website address, is often the entry point of the site. It must make a good impression for usability purposes, as well as for search engine optimization (SEO). Some of the useful tips for purchasing a good domain name include: making it easy to spell, keeping it as short as possible, using the proper domain extensions, creating an SEO-friendly URL, etc.
• Purchasing secure, scalable website hosting with good tech support - A website host (or sometimes referred to as a website hosting provider) is a company that offers the technology and services necessary for a website to be viewed on the internet. We connect our domain name to our hosting provider so that when users visit our website address, they are shown the website that we store on our hosting account. Hosting services can cost anywhere between $2 to $100+ per month, depending on the kind of technology and support we choose.
• Prominently displaying a clear description of the business - It is important to let people know who we are and what we do right away so they don’t feel confused when they visit our small business website. Make sure our main homepage banner (also known as a “hero image”) and subsequent banners are visual representations of our services, and also that we have an introductory text blurb near the top of the page that describes who we are and what we do. Additionally, make sure both our main and footer navigation menus have "About Us" page links easily accessible so people can click them and read more about your business in-depth.
• Implementing the best content management system - A content management system (CMS) is a software program or application that is used to create and manage digital content. A good CMS will help maintain our site, and we don’t need much technical knowledge to use it. Wordpress is the most popular CMS. It has a vast, active support community and many useful plugins to extend the functionality of the website. Drupal, Joomla, Suqaurespace, etc are the other popular CMS systems.
• Choosing a good e-commerce platform – Since we are planning to sell services on our website, we will be needing the right technology to do so. We will be allowing the users to financially transact with us online. Woocommerce is one of the world’s most popular e-commerce platforms—it can turn the WordPress website into an online store. Like WordPress, there are many plugins available, and it attaches to WordPress, which makes it extremely flexible. Shopify is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that allows you to create and customize an online store, and to manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping. It is not a WordPress extension like WooCommerce—it is a standalone platform that is hosted on the Shopify server
• Creating an interesting, memorable and engaging website user interface – Making sure that the website interface leaves a positive impression that drives results is highly essential. We can do so by implementing things like using beautiful graphics and easy-to-read fonts, making sure the graphics are compressed and optimized for fast loading. If the website is slow, search engines like Google will penalize its ranking, research the competition to see how they have designed and optimized their websites and implement similar components that will work for our website
• Optimizing the website for search engines - SEO is a set of practices we apply to our website to ensure search engines index and rank our website appropriately and then show it to search engine users. Once the website is “crawled” by search engines, it competes with websites that have similar content. The better our website design and content are, the higher the site will show up on search engine result pages.
• Installing webmaster tools - Make use of vital data to help analyze traffic and site performance by installing Google Analytics and Google Search Console (both preferably via Google Tag Manager ) and Bing Webmaster tools. It will help us track the information like; daily, weekly and monthly visitors to the site, number of views on each page of the site, bounce rate, average time spent on site by visitors, backlinks, etc.
• Implementing a website maintenance plan - A website shouldn’t be created and then allowed to grow stale. To have a successful website that ranks well in search engines and doesn't get hacked, we need to make sure it is properly maintained.

Conclusion

Creating a small business website may not be as simple as we think. Implementing the payment gateway APIs and tracking APIs like google maps will take a great deal of effort. It is also necessary to regularly seek feedback from all the stakeholders involved so that errors can be minimized in the development phase itself. Maintaining a robust and optimized database is of utmost importance so that we can track the historical data and can make informed decisions from it.

Attached File Details

View Attachment file (NMO.docx)