BSBEBU401: Assessment 1
Table of Contents
Task 1 1
Task 2 2
Task 3 3
Task 4 7
Task 5 8
Task 6 9
References 12
LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: Resources required 2
Table 2: Changes made to website 8
Table 3: Recommended software tools 8
Table 4: employee roles and permission 10
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: WordPress backend portal 4
Figure 2: Joomla 5
Figure 3: Sitecore content management system 6
Figure 4: Craft CMS 6
Figure 5: Changing title and adding social media icons 7
Figure 6: Contract exchanged title on a property 7
Task 1
The organisation, McDonald & Co is currently experiencing that it is unable to reflect unavailable properties and sales on the website whereas an in-house programmer is costly to manage considering the organisational requirements. Following are some of the recommendations to improve the organisational website:
Recommendations to ‘remove services no longer required’
- 60% of the customers think that advertising is annoying on the website and it can be removed as it is not one of the sources of revenue for the business.
- 70% of the customers want that the website has no broken links. Such links either need to remove or rectify with the right one.
- The website has almost no demand for commercial rentals. It can remove this service and can focus on property sales and residential rental properties.
Recommendations to ‘add services on the website’
- There is a need for a better search function to enable faster searching of the available content. It is significant to improve the overall customer experience with the website.
- The website also lacks content that can help it to stand out from others. There is a need to add more content regarding sales and rental properties.
- The website has a fair user interface and it can face significant competition from others in the industry. It can get improved home page, filters, listing of the properties with more useful information and faster loading performance with no or a smaller number of annoying things such as advertisements (Beaird et al., 2020).
- Customer ratings indicate that there is a need for attention on the interest rate as they are higher than most others in the market.
- An improved mortgage calculator is required with the inclusion of user interface components such as sliders to select several months/ years in a mortgage agreement.
- Customers are willing to get the newsletter and it is recommended to add a subscription box for customers to enrol for the weekly or monthly newsletter.
- Customers need easy ‘contact us’ detail so that an online map and easy to fill the form with contact detail is good to address their requirements.
- Customers also want to see links for official social accounts and pages so that they can follow the links to get current information on offers and deals and it can be used as a mode of communication also.
- There is also a demand for secondary features that can enhance the usability of the website. For instance, the customer expects selling tips, template of contract, suburb profiles and features to search the services by lifestyles.
Resource entailed
| Recommendation | Resource | Cost |
| Improved search function/ filters | Web developer | $4000 |
| Newsletter design | Graphic design team | $1120 |
Task 2
Customer analytics can be used to improve the website as it enables insights on website usage and customer profiles. For instance, search engine optimisation is essential for the website to attract new customers while enabling existing customers to find the website easily on the internet (Sauro, 2015). Currently, the website generates only 30% of the traffic from Google and 10% from other search engines. It has half of the traffic from the direct address of the website. If there are similar addresses on the internet in the real estate business, customers may not navigate to other websites due to a lack of similarities in their addresses.
Advertising on search engines and social websites can help to attract new customers. It can help to increase visitors to the website. Search engine optimisation is significant to put the website in front of search engine results. Further, 65% of the customers are first-time customers. The website needs to be improved with clearer links, responsive design and improved user experience to ensure that the customers can be retained.
Customers have an average of 2 pages per session and it means to have poor navigation on the website. Higher pages per session mean that customers are getting interested and exploring the content. It also indicates the website also may lack content for further browsing. Session time can be extended to 15-20 minutes for a user and it can be achieved with more quality content (King et al., 2016). Users flow for rent page and contact page is not sufficient and for that, cleared links are required on the website. User bounce rate also needs to bring lower and for that website can be host updated and quality content.
Task 3
Content management system
It is a software system that provides a graphical user interface to develop and manage the website. In comparison to custom-built websites, a content management system has several benefits as well as limitations (Barker, 2016).
Advantages: it allows to development of the website quickly without prerequisite knowledge of database and programming. It provides in-built page builders so that there is visual design to edit content and components on a page. Apart from easiness, such systems provide in-built features to control permission and security. It also helps to develop a search engine optimisation friendly website (Barker, 2016). There are features such as contact forms and live chats that help to achieve improved customer services.
Disadvantages: WordPress and several other content management systems have hidden costs for widgets and plugins and developers have a high dependency on plugins to develop the website. Therefore, it is difficult to differentiate the website from others if others are also using the same template (Beaird et al., 2020). Due to the integration of plugins and widgets, site load speed is low in comparison to a custom-built website. Developers may experience limitations in functional requirements and back-end functionality and websites on such systems are not highly scalable with business size.
Open-source
WordPress.org: it is built on MySQL and PHP and it is a widely used platform that runs around 1.3 billion websites all over the world. It has more than 54,000 themes and plugins that can be used to customise hobby blogs to the biggest news portals. It is easy to use and allows the publication of an unlimited number of posts, pages and products. It has features to roll back deleted pages and versions of the installation (WordPress. 2022). There is also avoidance of vendor lock-in. it has automatic backup, managed security, easy add-in of additional editors to ensure complete control on customisation.
Figure 1: WordPress backend portal
Joomla: it runs approximately 10% of the total websites in the world. It is a search engine and mobile-friendly, extensible, flexible and multilingual. It also has in-built search engine optimisation features. It has security-conscious development and it allows to build powerful applications. It runs on PHP and MySQL databases (Joomla. 2022).
Commercial CMS
Sitecore: it has an advanced editor that guides the users to add content for widgets and templates. It helps to ensure security, workflow, personalisation, versioning and various testing. It supports marketing automation, email experience management, content profiling and reporting and these advanced features make it the choice of commercials. It integrates cortex as an advanced marketing feature to support digital strategy and marketing outcomes. It has in-built reporting and publishing features that are robust for website management. It uses ASP.Net for development and a Microsoft SQL server is used to store data (Sitecore, 2022). Windows server is required to run it during hosting and for the local system, it needs visual studio and IIS server. Sitecore charges the customers considering several factors such as website traffic, number of domains, global reach, integration of other systems, bespoke functionality, additional modules and availability, performance and security.
Figure 3: Sitecore content management system
Craft CMS: it has a rich text editor with live content editing support, approval process, thousands of plugins and widgets, internet search and content authoring features. It supports search engine optimisation, enterprise scalability and several other features of other content management systems. It has differentiation from other systems considering its code optimisation, performance and security. It is built using PHP technology and it can connect easily with MySQL and PostgreSQL databases (Craft, 2022). It has three versions: free, pro and enterprise. The Pro version costs $299 per project whereas the enterprise version has feature-based costing.
Recommendations
McDonald & Co can use Craft CMS over other free and paid content management systems. In comparison to free versions, the organisation will get improved security and performance as it can select private space to host the files. Further, there is no hidden cost as in WordPress for themes and plugins. Joomla is difficult to edit because it has limited plugins and themes and the organisation has no in-house programmer for routine content management. Sitecore is expensive and it is not recommended considering the size of the organisation in the number of employees.
Task 4
Figure 5: Changing title and adding social media icons
Figure 6: Contract exchanged title on a property
The overall design of the selected template is good and it is easy to manage using wix.com. The template provides a home page, contact page and several other pages that help the customers to find the properties for sale and rent. Initially, it was lacking social media integration and it has not provided other pages such as download. Apart from these, the website needs slight improvement in fonts including their colour, size and style because it is inconsistent and hard to read (Nguyen, 2020). Considering the current design, it is determined that the website is easy to maintain and host the required content for the users. However, the organisation may need additional features that are part of the programming such as profiling for the customers and employees to deliver a customised user interface.
Following are changes made to the website with particulars:
Table 2: Changes made to website
| Date | Required change | Person responsible | Date complete | Further action |
| Edit title | No | |||
| Social media integration | Yes, target links are required to add | |||
| Title of a property | No |
Task 5
Following are some of the recommended tools to improve the website. It includes free and paid tools whereas creately.com is an online web application that can be used to draw diagrams.
Table 3: Recommended software tools
| Required | Software tools | References |
| XHTML pages | Adobe Dreamweaver and Coffee-cup HTML editor | https://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html https://www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/ |
| Photos | Corel Paint Shop and Adobe PhotoShop | https://www.coffeecup.com/html-editor/ https://www.paintshoppro.com/en |
| Drawings and diagrams | Creately.com and CorelDraw | https://www.coreldraw.com/en/product/coreldraw/ https://creately.com/ |
| Flash content | Flash-develop and mini-builder | http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=Main_Page https://code.google.com/p/minibuilder/ |
| PDF documents | Adobe Acrobat and Foxit PDF editor | https://www.adobe.com/in/acrobat/complete-pdf-solution.html https://www.foxit.com/pdf-reader/ |
| AVI movies | Avidemux and Lightworks | http://avidemux-mswin.sourceforge.net/ http://www.lwks.com/ |
Task 6
There are several laws that data security practices for online business. For instance, the organisation should use the electronic transactions act and the internet privacy protection act. The electronic transactions act is used to prevent abuse of the information systems. It is significant if any of the employees and customers are misusing the system considering their defined roles and responsibilities toward the system and data security. It is required to resolve the matters that are related to electronic transactions. This act also enables human resource development as essential for electronic transactions so that erroneous transactions can be prevented. This act also allows the organisation to retain information regarding transactions and provide relevant information to the second party in the transaction (Kwilinski et al., 2019). It is also recommended that there is the application of the internet privacy and protection act because this act prevents the internet service providers to use and selling app usage data, browsing history and another kind of personal information of the users. It also binds eCommerce companies for similar behaviour in their operations.
The following table contains the employees who are having rights to website updates and maintenance. There is also time after that they have to review the website and it is important to integrate the ongoing requirements before the occurrence of the consequences.
Table 4: employee roles and permission
| Employee | Title | Website admin rights | Responsibilities | Date to review and update website |
| Designer | UI/UX development and information structuring | To update the visual and graphic design and deliver an effective user experience. | ||
| Developer | Files read, write, create and update permissions. | To code the required functions and ensure security and performance through development. | ||
| Web manager | Add and remove pages, posts and images from a website but not from the storage. | To manage posts, pages and images | ||
| Social media and public relations coordinator | Social media modules only | To access customer queries and comments for particular social media modules. |
References
Barker, D., 2016. Web content management: Systems, features, and best practices. ” O’Reilly Media, Inc.”.
Beaird, J., Walker, A. and George, J., 2020. The principles of beautiful web design. Sitepoint.
Craft, 2022. Features that give you flexibility and control throughout the entire process. Retrieved from: https://craftcms.com/features. Accessed On: 05 March, 2022.
Joomla. 2022. Retrieved from: https://www.joomla.org/core-features.html. Accessed On: 05 March, 2022.
King, R.C., Schilhavy, R.A., Chowa, C. and Chin, W.W., 2016. Do customers identify with our website? The effects of website identification on repeat purchase intention. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 20(3), pp.319-354.
Kwilinski, A., Volynets, R., Berdnik, I., Holovko, M. and Berzin, P., 2019. E-Commerce: Concept and Legal Regulation in Modern Economic Conditions. Journal of Legal, Ethical and Regulatory Issues, 22, pp.1-6.
Nguyen, T., 2020. Web design fundamentals: Web builder software. Australian Law Librarian, 28(3), pp.165-167.
Sauro, J., 2015. Customer analytics for dummies. John Wiley & Sons.
Sitecore, 2022. Sitecore for content management. Retrieved from: https://www.sitecore.com/solutions/business-goal/content-management. Accessed On: 05 March, 2022.
WordPress. 2022. Meet WordPress. Retrieved from: https://wordpress.org/. Accessed On: 05 March, 2022.
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