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*** Table of Contents ***

Web site development | 3

welcome text

terms and conditions

intellectual property

products description

post-sale relationship

Market Research | 8

school environment

friends and family

peers

accidental visitors

find and describe competition

SWOT analysis

Financial planning and budgeting | 10

resources

time

money

Marketing planning and visitors tracking | 13marketing activities

google analytics

Launching the web site | 16

beta-testing

bugs

Planing sales | 18

forecast

end-result

Marketing activities | 19Weekly analysis presentation | 20

Conclusion | 21

Appendix 1 | 28

Appendix 2 | 29

Appendix 3 | 30

Appendix 4 | 31

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*** 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. HTML

2. CSS

3. JavaScript

4. 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 tofit the purposes of the assignment. Here is the the link where you can find the original design by

Andreas Vinklund - < http://andreasviklund.com/templates/ >

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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. welcome text

2. terms and conditions

3. about

4. intellectual property

5. product description

6. 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

Final HTML + CSS designed web page


5/31


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.

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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 usingelectronic 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 washoping 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.

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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 wouldinterest them and spark a discussion with

their friends which can also come to the

web site.

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 e-

mail. 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.

Page 7 Georgi Butev

Pilsner

Staropramen

Gambrinus

Budwar

Frisco

Kelt

beer e-card crazy animals e-card


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*** 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):

Page 8 Georgi Butev

Blue Mountain

Hallmark

123 greetings

eGreetings

Card Fountain


9/31


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 website 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.

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*** 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. Assessment of business environment

2. Confirm the business vision and objectives

3. Identify the types of resources needed to achieve the objectives

4. Quantify the amount of resources (labor, equipment, materials)

5. Calculate the total cost of each type of resource

6. Summarise the costs to create a budget

7. 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

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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 threemonths 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

* analyse results

* pick-up steady pace

* send e-mails to friends

* promote in social web site

* promote in IMs, blogs and forums

* marketing campaign

1 month 15 days 15 days

2 monthstotal


12/31


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 stepout of business, the team will have to be fired and the project will fail.

We have agreed on the following budget:

Products Prices in Czech Crowns (Kc)

beer cards 100

cars cards 80

crazy animals 95

flowers 110

places 80

sport 90

swiss 75

world capitals 85

votes 200

Cost of technical implementation and maintenance:

Action Price in Czech Crowns (Kc)

Programming 30 000 once & 5 000

Design 25 000 once

Domain and hosting 5 000 monthly

Marketing 5 000 monthly

Wages 20 000 per employee

The result and break even point are discussed in the conclusion chapter.



13/31


*** 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. Thematerials collected for the audit come from:

1. Who are the customers?

2. What are their characteristics?

3. What differentiate them from other customers?

4. What are their needs?

5. What do they expect product to do?

6. What are their attitudes?

7. 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)



14/31


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 touse 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 campaigns7. 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 visitors5. 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



15/31


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.



16/31


*** 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.



17/31


Functionality

The biggest complain about the functionality of the web site came from dissatisfaction with the e-

cards site. Not to forget though is that we postponed the official web site launch because the votingsection 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.



18/31


*** 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 long-

term prediction. However there is certain trend, peaks and lows and just a normal pace of the

visitors and 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


The class decided that at

the of the class we will have

more than 100 sales.

x = 10

a = 20

b = 5

y = x*30 + a - b

y = 315


19/31


*** 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.



20/31


*** Weekly Analysis Presentation ***

follow the attachment



21/31


*** 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. Thegraphics 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 bestill 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



22/31


About and terms and conditions

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 legalprecaution 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 success



23/31


The e-cards

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 anduploading 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 ofcharge and yet there was negative feedback and complains received from Oliver. Such an issues

should have been immediately dealt with and fixed.

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.


more cards:

* fun / joke like

* exotic places

My Suggestion

Polls with questions that people

generally wish and dream about

Like our popular question where

would you like to live?

Polls with question that people

heatedly discuss. In other words

controversial ones. Like my

poll about George Bush and Iraq.


24/31


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.

SWOTanalysis

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 success



25/31


My suggestion are as follows:

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 thequestions 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 success



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Money

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 apoor 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 revenue per month

sales of electronic cards visits * average price of cards 150 * 89.75 = 13'462.5 Kc

sales of polls votes * price 100 * 200 = 20'000 Kc

total sales sale of e-cards + sales of polls 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


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Visitors tracking

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 success



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*** Appendix 1***

< journals >




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*** Appendix 2 ***

< market research presentation >




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*** Appendix 3 ***

< posters >




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*** Appendix 4 ***

< terms of service >


Commercial Web Site Development

Documents

Transcript of Commercial Web Site Development