Website Design Strategies

A business making big strides online can find itself in difficulty if it becomes dependent on Internet technology only to discover that when there is a technical disaster, the business is put immediately under threat.

This means that the managers would be sensible to have contingency plans based on ‘What if…?’ scenarios.

What would they do if something went wrong?

What would customers do?

One of the most fundamental things overlooked when developing a new e-commerce website is user acceptance testing. Many web developers underestimate what is involved in testing an e-commerce site from the user’s perspective. System testing and load balancing are important. If a new site is not user friendly or does not meet the expectation of the target audience, it can cost a new Internet business dearly. The following steps need be taken to ensure thorough testing of a new website.

1. Complete all system testing and quality assurance (QA) before commencing user acceptance testing. This allows the testers to focus on usability issues and not technical defects.

2. Use ordinary online users to test the site. Do not use the development or production team. This ensures people testing the site are new to this online shopping experience. First impressions are important.

3. Write a testing plan explaining in plain English what needs to be tested and how. Construct testing routines for every page in the site, detailing expected results of all the functionality. From these, the tester can easily identify the appropriate outcome from every action response.

4. Test on all target platforms and browsers. These should be outlined in the site’s technical specification. But make sure they are listed again in the test plan document.

5. A senior project leader rather than the testers should conduct prioritisation of defect fixing. This ensures that change control tasks are allocated to the right people. The project leader should also make sure the development teams change the status of a defect once it is fixed.

6. Conduct at least three rounds of testing. This ensures after change control has been completed, any ‘fixes’ do not have an impact on any other functions on the site.

The costs associated with developing a website depend on the level of sophistication that is built into it. This governs the amount of time and the level of skills that are needed. A number of components go together to determine cost.

• Graphics – This includes the page layout and images to create the look and feel of a site. If a business needs graphic designers to create logos and colour schemes, this can add to the costs.

• Photography – The business may require photographs placed on the site. If photos are already held in stock then this brings the cost down.

• Coding – This is the creation of an interactive site. Web browsers understand the code known as HTML . The complexity of the code required governs the time taken and hence the cost.

• Content – Website ‘copy’ refers to the words that are placed within web pages. Copywriting services can be bought and are charged according to the amount of work involved. Often clients requiring a website provide the copy themselves.

• Web hosting and domain name – Web hosting has already been covered on pages 469– 70.

The business adopting a website will pay for the hosting of the site on a web server and will also need to purchase a domain name.

Domain names can be bought quite cheaply from as little as about £8. Ongoing site maintenance and hosting can cost between £90 and £200 for two years.

There are several techniques used for authentication, to identify and verify someone seeking to access an e-commerce system. These include:

• a username and password requirement, where the password can vary in length and include numbers and characters

• ‘two-factor’ authentication requiring something the user has (for example, an authentication token) and something the user knows (for example, a personal identification number)

• a digital certificate that enables authentication through the use of an individual’s unique signing key

Websites are gaining in importance as the public face of many businesses. The additional revenues generated by e-commerce systems mean that organisations are becoming ever more reliant on them as significant elements of their business strategy. With this high level of dependency on the services provided by e-commerce systems, it is essential that they are protected from the threats posed by hackers, viruses, fraud and denial-of-service attacks. E-commerce systems are based on the web, and this provides open and easy communications on a global basis. However, because the Internet is unregulated, unmanaged and uncontrolled, it introduces a wide range of risks and threats.

Web pages are typically created using HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML). While HTML is a relatively simple code to learn, several companies specialise in developing highly sophisticated authoring software for website creation. These make it possible for even an amateur developer to work within a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) environment, to create useful and usable web pages. Authoring tools do the HTML automatically. There are several advantages to using web authoring tools, for example:

• speed of creation

• ease of use by non-HTML experts ability to create large numbers of consistent pages. Macromedia Dreamweaver is an industrial standard authoring package. It has been available for several years in different versions. It is both an HTML editor and a site management tool. Each version has encompassed new features and improvements. The typical Dreamweaver working environment shows the main menu bar running along the top of the screen, allowing a website developer to:

• create new files

• modify a page’s properties (set a background colour or image)

• insert several choices (tables, images)

• select font styles or colours.

The ‘site’ option on the bar allows the developer to view and manage a whole site structure. Most websites contain several pages functioning as an interlinked group.