E-Commerce Website Design for UK-Techni University - Case Study Example

E- COMMERCE WEBSITE DESIGN FOR UK-TECHNI UNIVERSITY. INTRODUCTION : The advent of new telecommunication techniques has revolutionized the educational scenario. The massive use of the internet by many people has lead to new methods of teaching and course delivery. These new methods of E-learning are focused on using the latest computer and electronic tools to impart the course efficiently than the traditional face to face methodology of teaching. To achieve a perfect implementation of this system of education, the universities are required to offer best services in terms of enrolment, course delivery, payment dealings, considering improvement in the existing services through interactive feedback from the staff and students involved. This good service demands the presence of efficient website through which online interactions can be done. So any institute or university which plans to offer online learning and interactive course delivery needs to concentrate on web design with a notion of E - Commerce . The university under the focus of this article is the UKTechni university which is involved in teaching computing , IT and related subjects. This report deals with the design issues involved in the E – Commerce website design process. The aim of this report is to provide a strategic plan for development of the E – commerce website which takes care of activities like online student registration , online bookshop of the university, online tutorial exchange , online fees payment , an enquiry system to deal with students queries and problems and finally a budget has been proposed for the setup and development of the E – Commerce website along with some legal issues in developing and maintaining a website. THE PROBLEM SCENARIO : The background of UKTechni university : The UKTechni university is a private university imparting courses under the category of Information technology , computing and other related subjects. The management of this university seems to be a popular and well established Telecom company. The company already owns a technical training college to give training to the employees of the company. This parent company seems to be wealthy and is capable of investing more for the purpose of the university’s development. The fields proposed for development are ebusiness computing facility, teaching facilities , telecommunication facilities and e-commerce website. The university has high criteria for registration and also the fees collected by this university is more compared to other universities. The location of this university is single campus in UK , but there are proposals for a second campus in a large location which is expected to house many popular computer and IT companies. The proposal has high chances of being implemented practically due to the support of many high level politicians . Moreover the chancellor of the university is wife of a cabinet minister. The problems in UKTechni university : The university has employed many staff with the background of networking and computing , but due to lack of expertise they prefer to use purchased off-the-shelf products during problem situations. The problematic areas that need to be addressed include online enrolment of students , online payment of fees , online purchase of books with special discounts , posting the lecture materials and assignments on the university’s website , providing computer facility for students inside the university as well as in their residence , managing the internet response time when the download by students is more and the proposal to use MP3 files extensively . Also the management has to finalise the issue related to web hosting , as there is a proposal for the university’s own website or the web hosted by a well known groupware manufacturer who often supplies it’s products free of cost to the university. The university seems to be very particular that all the staff – student interactions must be only through the website. All lecture notes and tutorials must be made available in the web. The meetings must become paperless and the staff improvement activities must also be published through the website. Another critical factor that pose to be as a problem is the safety of these costly equipments. One of the major tasks that has to be implemented in the near future is the availability of live lectures for a student through Wi-Fi , so that the student can get access to it from anywhere inside and outside the campus. BASIC DESIGN STRATEGIES FOE E – COMMERCE WEBSITE : Most of the major problems cited above can be solved by implementing a website dedicated to the functioning of the university. Website design involves the creation of web pages and connectivity between them. The basic design is a combination of textures , lines , shapes , etc . to have a pleasing look. This web design is achieved with the help of web structural languages like HTML ( Hyper Text Markup Language ) and XML ( Extensible Markup Language ) . Presentation languages like CSS ( Cascading Style Sheets ) and XSL help in controlling the layout and appearance of the website. Apart from these the scripting languages like Javascript and other object models like dom also aid the design of a website. The intention of creating an E – Commerce website is to do business on the web and to earn money . E – Commerce involves all the tools and software for money transaction on the web. The strategy for web design is highly important. The strategy in designing the website depends on the strategy of the online business involved. Some of the web strategies are The web content – here it is the well presented information about the university. The community that is being attracted towards the website – here it is the student community that expects a state - of - art infrastructure facilities and quality educational methods . E- Commerce – for this site it is the ability to transact fees and sale of books in a secured and accountable manner . The final strategy can be the intranet of the university. Personalisation. Apart from these strategies , the other important criteria are trust and confidence that a consumer ( student ) acquires while visiting and transacting through the website. Trust has been quoted as one of the most highly valuable element in business relationships, because in governs the risks involved in electronic economic transactions (Familiarity , Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives , 1988). Knowledge of User Experience ( UX ) is more important than User Interface ( UI ) for the website to be revisited ( Affective Design of E - Commerce User Interfaces : How to Maximise Perceived Trustworthiness , 2001 ) . The next step is to prioritise the problems that are to be solved. The first priority goes to the web design of the online registration and fees payment. Next the priority falls on the shop book. The online publishing and access of the lecture notes and assignments gets the next priority. Student interaction and feedback gets the next priority which comes before the priority to online meetings and staff improvement activities. PROPOSED DESIGN OF THE UNIVERSITY WEB SITE : The main task is the design of the main website of the university. Generally a website is a collection of web pages which are connected with each other through links . The first step is to establish the domain name of the website . With this as the root , the remaining pages are linked. The highly prior problems must be given consideration in the main page. The following figure shows a proposed layout for the main page design. Here all the link boxes are required to have links to individual web pages. These web pages are actually the .html files under the root domain. PROPOSED DESIGN FOR THE ONLINE FEE PAYMENT : The online fees payment is considered to be one of the most important task which needs highly secured transaction. In web e-commerce a secured transaction can be guaranteed with the use of SSL ( Secured Socket Layers ) which provides high privacy for the customers. The essential links for this web page might include the type of payment , name and register number of student , amount and mode of payment , etc. a proposed template for the design of this web page can be as shown in the following figure. The online verification of credit card details can be done with the help of merchant account ( Security Issues on the web , 2002 ) . To ensure more secured online payment transaction a digital signature along with SSL ( Secured Socket Layer ) encryption can be used. This web page can be implemented as a html or shtml file with a link from the root main web page. The web page is designed to have the ‘ type of payment’ field as the first control. Later all the fields are required to be filled before exiting. The exit operation has to be connected to the main page for further action by the customer student . PROPOSED DESIGN FOR THE ONLINE BOOKSHOP : The university has proposals for establishing an online book shop. Also there are incentives for online purchase of books in the form of discounts to specific books. The students have the opportunity to buy books online with secured methods of payments and assured quick delivery. This web page has to the root for few other web pages , which may include details about searching a specific book from the available database , adding the selected book to a shopping cart or list , details about payment for the purchased books , etc. the main web page for the book shopping could be like the following proposed layout . The main link for this web page is the search for books field. This in turn has to be linked with the other fields . The return link to the main web page from this web page has to be through the back to home field. The individual fields have to be linked to their corresponding web pages whose main activities are as shown in the following figures. The web page for the search for books link has to be as in following figure The details of the web page corresponding to the view book details has to be as follows The web page for add to cart field must be capable of creating a list of the selected books and calculating their total cost . a proposed design for this has been shown below as The details of the payment field has to be somewhat similar to the fees collection web page . PROPOSED DESIGN FOR THE ONLINE STUDENT REGISTRATION : The registration of students through online application has been under the proposal of the management of the university. There needs to be a proper strategy for the receiving the application from the students and maintaining their identity for further processing of the registration process. This can be done by the use of providing acknowledgement after registration. The following design can be taken as a prototype for the registration web page. After the submit or cancel action the tag links to the home page and an acknowledgement is provide to the customer in the form of registration number . BUDGET AND LEGAL ISSUES FOR THE E COMMERCE WEBSITE : The proposed website has to be implemented after a budget proposal . The costs involved in developing and maintaining a website includes fixed costs and controllable costs ( Access E – Commerce , 2008 ) . The fixed cost may be due to domain registration fees , internet service provider fees , extra phone lines , insurances taken , credit card processing and bank processing fees. The controllable costs include email handling charges , web maintenance software , log analysis program, auto responder mail facility , shopping carts , outsourcing costs – web , database , software like browsers, graphic design , costs of additional hardware like scanners , modems , fax machines and backup systems. Finally the advertising costs spent on banner ads and others to attract student and parent communities. The easiest and simplest way to own a e-commerce site is to have the payments processed by some other merchant website like paypal , with whom a merchant account has to be maintained. An association with google adwords program eases the advertising and listing preferences of the e - commerce website. During the web design efforts must be made to be sure that javascript functionality works well on a wide possible varieties of web browsers ( ecommerce website cost , 2006 ) . The important legal issues in developing a website are concerned with trademark registration and incorporation ( Legal issues for ecommerce business , 2002) . Incorporation is essential for limiting personal liability and to have a separate social security number for tax purposes. Trademark registration enables the students or customers to correctly identify the services. Also copyright protection gives right to the owner regarding website content publishing , distributing and copying. CONCLUSION : The above report provides a strategic plan for the e – commerce web site for the UKTechni university. Initially the problem scenario has been discussed and the problems have been prioritised. After prioritising the problems a proposed design approach has been discussed to solve the problems individually. Different layouts for the web pages give a detailed description of the steps involved in solving the problem situation. Later issues related to the budget and legal aspects of developing and maintaining the we site have also been discussed. REFERENCES : 1. Access eCommerce ,( 2002 ) : Enhancing rural development through electronic commerce , University of Minnesota , < www.accessecommerce.com> Accessed 10 , November ,2008. 2. E – commerce website cost , ( 2008 ) : How much does an ecommerce website cost , < www.costhelpers.com > Accessed 11 , November , 2008. 3. Helander, Khalid and Tham , ( 2001 ) : Affective Design of E-Commerce User Interfaces: How to Maximise Perceived Trustworthiness , Proceedings of The International Conference on Affective Human Factors Design , Asean Academic Press, London. 4. Luhmann, N. ( 1988 ) : Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives. Gambetta, D. (Ed.) . (1988). Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, Basil Blackwell. 5. Judit Silver ( 2002 ) : Legal Issues for eCommerce Business , < www.sitepoint.com > Accessed 12 , November 2008. 6. Security Issues on the Web ( 2002 ) , Stylus Systems Pvt. Ltd., < www.web-enable.com > Accessed 10 November , 2008. Read More