Niceties Hotel Website - Assignment Example

Proposal for Niceties Hotel website Name Unit 21 April 2012 Proposal for Niceties Hotel website Introduction The hotel industry serves clients from all over the world. This large clientele base need a source of information of all the products offered. Marketing needs to be done using the most recent avenue which is a website. The website will be updated with the most recent information to help client make their decision on which products to choose. Some of the biggest hotels like the Hilton have websites giving details about their product and also allowing payment online. The growth is seen by the number of hits and bookings made online. This booking would not be possible if a website did not exist in the first place. Business Background The Niceties hotel provides lodging facilities, events organization, indoor and outdoor catering facilities. The lodging facilities are where clients can book rooms by visiting the hotel offices physically or making a call to the administration. Rooms are priced differently according to the numbers of beds and occupants who can be accommodated. The catering facility involves providing meals to people with different events like weddings, birthday parties or offices dinners. Catering department provide tents and seats to client at an extra cost whenever need arises. Clients are allowed to make reservation of tables if they would like to hold meetings within the hotel rooms. These facilities are marketed through word of mouth or billboards displayed on the highway. The hotel has been in the forefront of accommodating tourists from Asia, Europe and the Americas. These clients are mostly booked in by their travel agents who get a commission out of every client they book in the hotel. Business Goals The business would like to increase the number of hotel bookings by an approximately 10% by January 2013. This can only be achieved by identifying new market locations and trying to identify untapped markets. One of the markets that need entry is Africa and the Far East Asia. These places have a number of business men who visit Australia all the time of the year. Advertisement in this market can only be done by adapting new advertisement strategy. One of the strategies is through social Medias like facebook, gplus and twitter. Success in these forms of advertisement can only be achieved by developing a website for the Niceties Hotel. The hotel has a goal of opening branches in New York and Cairo. These branches will be our reference point in Africa and America. The Cairo branch will serve tourists who travel from Europe to see the Pharaoh tombs in Egypt. The New York branch will accommodate tourists visiting New York from Australia. Getting clients in these new locations is easy because clients would like to be identified with a Hotel that has roots in their home country. Website Goals The goal of the website will be to increase the number of sales and awareness of our new products. The website will have the Google translator plug-in which will enable clients from different parts of the world read details on our website using their local national languages. The website will also be used as a marketing tool during the launch of new business products. The new products can be a new branch opening and price changes in the variety of product offered in our menu. The website will provide an online customer care desk for the different clients. This is enabled by having a customer care personnel who answers clients questions from the online chat available on the site. This will improve on client relation by allowing clients confirm any issues before making a booking, order or payment online. The online help desk will be used to improve the business rating by 25% by the end of 2013. The website will provide a booking platform for rooms and catering services which will reduce the number of clients visiting the office physically. The online office will increase efficiency and accountability by provision of evidence of different transaction carried out online. Target audience The website is supposed to cater for the young clients who would like to carry out their transaction from home or offices. This group of client is aged between 18-30 years. The clients mostly search through the internet for holiday destination, hotel prices while making enquiries on their holiday destinations. This group of clientele has a possibility of growing our market share by higher percent if reached in the correct medium of advertisement. The group of client would like to have different packages of the same product because of the constraint in the disposable income. Some of these clients would like to share a room to reduce the cost of accommodation leading to need of having an option of renting a room or tent on your own or as a group. This group also tends to organize trips as a group leading to need of having camping packages that involves groups of 10 to 20 people. Forecasted use Environment The website will be visited using desktop and laptop computers mostly. Some clients will be using mobile devices like the I pad, Black Berries and Smart phones. The group of clients using mobile devices will require development using tools that allow automatic compatibility in different devices of different sizes. To facilitate use of the website on the mobile devices minimal use of flash movies on the website which loads slowly will be considered. The mobile devices tend to have slow internet connection leading to need of having a light website. The website will be accessed from different browser such as the Firefox and Internet explorer. The development of the website will consider browser compatibility of the website to avoid a situation where a client gets a cluttered website on some of the browsers. The website having taken care of slow internet connection on the clients’ devices and browser compatibility will ensure efficiency in communicating the message it is carrying. Competitors Web site analysis The Australian Heritage Hotel && Australia Hotel Site name Features Hotel Color choice pictures logo Navigation usability Australia hotel The Color choice is lime and brown Most pictures include clients enjoying the different products offered by the hotel The business has not included a logo in the website. The navigation menus are at the upper most part of the document. This makes it hard to trace them in the pages. The website is friendly on the basis of navigation. Australian heritage hotel Green and white, the colors give a good view of the website. The home page has a picture of the main business The logo is a man holding an arrow. The navigation is done through menus available at the top of the page The usability of the website is good compared to the Australia hotel The Australia hotel website does not offer the ability to make online booking or search through the website. This will make it hard for clients to locate information within the website. Website Content The website will have the products, Home, contact, about us, new products and offering page. The home page will have the vision and mission statement of the niceties hotel. Apart from this two we will have a search fields and buttons at the upper right hand side of the page which allows clients to search existence of certain rooms for accommodation. On the right hand side of the home page we will have a search field and a button that allows clients to find certain information like products within the website. The search will done by the client feeding in some key words like catering which will provide information on the different catering facilities offered by the hotel. The about us page will give details on the history of the niceties hotel. These details might include when the hotel was started and how it has come to grow through out that period. Some other details available here are the different branches and where they are situated either in Australia or outside. The locations details will allow the client make a physical enquiry if they live near any of the business branches. The contact us page will have details about the physical address of the business, fax numbers, telephone and email address. These details will be relevant wherever a client needs to communicate with the business. A chat room button will be available on the bottom of the page which gives clients a chance to chat with our customer support from the website. A contact form that allows clients sends a mail directly from the website is provided. The products page will have all the different services and products offered by the business. The products will be grouped under accommodation, catering, food and event organization. Each product will have a picture displayed and a price tag below it. The clients at this point can make purchases by clicking on the add to cart button on the product page. Once a customer confirms their purchases they are redirected to the payment page. All payments will be collected through a business PayPal account. The offering page will contain details of product that are on offer for a certain period of time. One of the products that would be here is the reduction in the cost of certain food types like the pizza. The offer would be clients getting two pizzas for the price of one on certain days of week or hours of the day. The other information available on this page is the special menu for a certain day. The new product page will provide details of upcoming products in the market. The page can be used to advertise new branches. All the pages will have the business logo at the left hand corner of the page. This will enhance identity of the business no matter which page the clients visits. A banner will be available on all of the pages at the top. The banner will have pictures of the different products offered by the hotel. Users Tasks The users of the website will have an ability to search of different rooms available in the hotel from the home page. Once a user carries out the search successfully they can decide to make reservation or pay online. The reservation will be confirmed via an email or phone to the contact information provided by the clientele. The administrator will have control page to feed details on the number of rooms available in the hotel, their pictures and some literature if they need to make changes. An administration page to view the different reservations made will be available. This will eliminate the need of the administrator having knowledge in any database related language. Chat capability will be included in the website which will allow clients make enquiries through the live chat plug-in. The chat can be used between different workers from different offices or client to workers. Search of any type of information within the site is also assured through the search field on the home page of the website. The search will allow people locate any information as easy as possible from the website. Users of the website will have a link to the facebook page of the hotel that will have comments about different clients who have sampled our services. This will help them believe in the quality of services we are offering in the market. Another site they will have a link to is the twitter social site where news of the most current changes in the hotel will be available. Conclusions The business taking information technology as a way of running its activities will eventually lead to increase in the sales and market share of the business. The website will also increase customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is ensured by having timely answering of clients’ details through the online chat room and ability of the administrator to answer emails sent by the clients. References Craig, B.(2007). Designing integration tests. Retrieved from http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/enterprise-solutions/designing-integration-tests-17371. Jakob, N., 1994. Usability Inspection Methods. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Michael, C., and Steven, P.,2007. Web application vulnerabilities: detect, exploit ,and prevent. London: SAGE. Stair, R., Moisiadis, F., Genrich, R., and Reynolds, G., 2008. Principles Of Information Systems. Melbourne, Australia: CEng age Learning. Read More