Developing Website and Blog for Caf Cuisine - Essay Example

Developing Website and Blog for Café Cuisine 1. Introduction The website is considered as one of the sources to enhance an existing business or to establish a new business. Keeping in new the fact, the Café Cuisine – a newly established restaurant decided to develop a website so that an e-Business can be started. The website would provide information regarding the restaurant over the internet to the customers. Moreover, the Café Cuisine has decided the business model of business to consumer to be presented by the website. In order to market the website of the Café Cuisine has decided to have their appearance on one of the Blogs – a free web service. The document presents justification of the business model adopted by the Café Cuisine and a detailed discussion on the processes required to develop the website of the Café Cuisine for establishing their e-business. The document provides justification for selection of the web contents as well as the contents published over the blog for attracting the customers. It is pertinent to identify, analyze and evaluate the issues pertain to the e-Business including the electronic transactions, the procurement channel, and the supply chain management. Considering the importance of evaluating the e-business issues on failure or success, the document provides a brief description of these issues. 2. Business Model Business models for the e-Commerce can be categorized into the various categories include but are not limited to the Business - to - Consumer (B 2 C), Business - to - Business (B 2 B), Consumer - to - Business (C 2 B) and Business - to - Government (B 2 G) (Lauden and Traver, 2012). From the given business models, the Café Cuisine has selected Business - to - Consumer (B 2 C) considering their type of business i-e provision of cooked food services to the customers. In Business to Consumer business model, the Café Cuisine would sell the food products directly to the customers or consumers. The website of the Café Cuisine would facilitate the consumers to visit / review the food products online while sitting at their own places, select and order the food products. The menu list of the Café Cuisine would be available over the website containing the food items and their prices. Once the consumer / customer selected and ordered for the food item, the same would be delivered to the Café Cuisine management and they manage to sever the consumer order at their place. As the product of the Café Cuisine has directly been utilized by the consumer, therefore, the Café Cuisine’s management decided to adopt B2C business model. Moreover, the B2C business model can facilitate the Café Cuisine to grow their business by planning and achieving clear objectives and goals. The website facilitates to manage huge customers at a time for reviewing their menus as well as placing orders. Taking into consideration facts and benefits of the B2C business model, the Café Cuisine decided to adopt it (Nikov, n.d). 3. Website Development and Evaluation A website development process has to be utilized for development of the Café Cuisine’s website (Alexander, B., n.d). Initially, while website development, we carefully taken the requirements of the Café Cuisine for the development of the website. The requirements of the Café Cuisine consisted of functional and non-functional requirements (Vandeuren, 2012). In the next phase, we iteratively create the design of the website that was highly important to make the website usable. The usability is one of the features of the quality website. After completing the design of the website in the Dreamweaver, we started to write the contents of the website, as well as planed the contents of the Blog (Calhoun, 2003). We searched some pictures from the Google to incorporate them in the website. It is pertinent to mention here that incorporating the other’s work (picture) in your work is illegal and unethical. But as both of us (team members) do not have the skill of designing the logo or pamphlet, therefore, we have just taken them from the web. After deciding the pictures, the contents of the website have to be finalized. It is vital to state here that two contents have to be finalized, one pertains to the website of the Café Cuisine and other is for Blog of the Café Cuisine. Once these steps have been completed, we tested our website against the requirements provided by the Café Cuisine. Moreover, technical (coding) as well as the apparent (user interface) testing of the website was performed by our team members. 3.1 E-Business Rationale It is significant to specify and evaluate the features of the website as well as the e-business, so that the e-business can be justified (Song and Zinkhan, 2003). We have followed the guidelines of the World Wide Web Consortium in order to develop the food website for Café Cuisine. The website has been developed in Dreamweaver 5.0 supports hypertext markup language (HTML) version 5.0. The Café Cuisine website ensures the browser compatibility with all the major browsers include: Firefox, Google Chrome, Netscape, Internet Explorer and Opera. The web pages of the website of the Café Cuisine can be viewed fully at zoom level of the 125% expansion in all major browsers. Moreover, the pages of the website are properly viewed in the resolution of your computer at 640 × 480 pixels. For the marketing purpose, we have properly included various tags on the website in order to integrate the Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This would not only help to easily search the Café Cuisine website over the search engines as well as increases rate of the website. In the non-functional requirements, we have focused on the security, regularity and data integrity, maintenance, availability, reliability and ease of operation and performance of the website. One of the critical non-functional requirements is the ease of use, we have deliberately worked on this requirement so he the customer cannot find any difficulty while viewing food items, selecting any item or placing orders over the website. Moreover, it requires that the design of the content management system of the proposed website should be simple and easy to use and understand. However, this feature has not been included yet, but we will include it in the future enhancements. We would like to comment generally over the website appearance that the website is simple comprises of only two main colors orange and white background that enhances readability of the text (WalkerSands, 2013). 4. Web Contents The website and Blog has to be developed keeping in view their targeted audience that is the people used to order restaurant’s food for home delivery on a regular basis. Keeping in view the menu of the Café Cuisine, it has been decided that the age of these people should lie between the sixteen (16) years to forty five (45) years. Moreover, it has been noticed that during the office hours, the professional working at offices orders food of restaurant from their offices for delivery. Therefore, keeping in view the fact it is expected that the targeted audience of the Café Cuisine’s website is the professional users of the internet. However, the website is developed in such a way that the novice users who can send / receive emails can use the website for ordering the food efficiently. Simply it can be stated that the targeted audience should understand using the internet (Matt, 2011). 4.1 The Website’s Content The first page of the website is the ‘Home’ page that gives first and final impression to the visitors. Within just around thirty (30) seconds, after viewing the Home page, the visitor decides whether to stay at the website or not. One of the main things that the visitor wants is the website usability i-e they found effortlessly whatever they want to do with the website of the Café Cuisine. All the team members work on the website while concentrating at the usability and simplicity factors of the website. Therefore, mainly we used two main colors with a picture worth more than thousand words describing the theme and objective of the website. All the important links or pages of the website are given on the Home page of the website include: About, Menu, FAQ, Contact Us and Blog. The screenshot of the Home page of the Café Cuisine website is given below (Macdonald, 2013). One of the imperative pages of the website is the ‘Menu’ page that provides information regarding food items available at the Café Cuisine along with their prices. Moreover, the page indicates the prevailing offers or deals available at the Café Cuisine. The following screenshot displays the information regarding ‘Catering Services’ provided by the Café Cuisine. The page contains text describing precisely the catering services along or without food delivery. There are always certain questions that the customers / visitors frequently asked by the café Cuisine. Therefore, the following web page of ‘FAQ’ (Frequently Asked Questions) contains the questions which are frequently asked by the customers / visitors and their answers or guidelines for the visitors. One of the vital web pages of the website is the ‘Contact Us’ page contains the contact details including the telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, mailing address, and contact us form. The contact us form is developed so that if the customer(s) / visitor(s) does not get their answer at the FAQ page, they can specifically asked by using this form. The screenshot of the Contact Us page is given below. A screenshot of the order and payment page is given below. The web page does not contain any text; however, the customer places their order using the web page. The web page is designed to get the information of the customer, their order as well as the payment details. 4.2 The Blog’s Content The objective of developing the Blog is different from the objective of the website and the same should clearly be depicted by their contents. One of the objectives of the Blog is to provide marketing facilities for the Café Cuisine website and to be used as the advertisement tool; however, the Café Cuisine’s website is to take orders from the customers. Therefore, the contents of the Blog do not contain the order / payment form and the contact us form only. However, on the other hand, the static information on the website as well as the Blog is somehow same. Mainly, the contents of the Blog consist of the offers, deals, menu items, pricing and the benefits of using the services of the Café Cuisine. 5. E-Business Issues Some of the e-business issues have already been discussed in this paper; however, the critical issue is the provision of security (a non-functional requirement) to the payments made by the customers. As we do not have skills for maintaining the financial security, therefore, we render services of the payment gateway to provide security for the customer’s payments. In order to maintain the supply chain management, we have to hire the services of the professional managing the supply chain. The automated system / website would facilitate the professionals by providing inventory figures and information (Velmurugan, 2009). 6. Conclusion The e-businesses are getting fame day by day with the devastating penetration of the internet into our societies. In order to develop an e-business designing of a website is compulsory accompanying at-least one or more Blogs. The purposes of the website and the Blog should be different, if they are developed on the same topic to get diverse benefits. And typically, the Blog is created for assisting the objective of the website. Considering these facts, we believe that the website and Blog would help us to achieve the objectives of the Café Cuisine. We believe that the Café Cuisine would raise their profits by attracting more customers utilizing the website and Blog. Reference List Calhoun, B., D., 2003. Best Practices: Designing and Developing Web-Based Trainings with Macromedia Flash, Dreamweaver and ColdFusion. [online] Available at [Accessed 20 December 2013] Vandeuren, Y., 2012. Non-Functional Requirements for a Website. [Online] Available at: [Accessed 21 December 2013] Lauden, K. C. and Traver, C. G., (2012). E-Commerce, Business Technology Society 8th Ed. Premium Education Inc. Nikov, A., n.d. E-Commerce Business Models and Concepts. University of West Indies at ST. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago Alexander, B., n.d. Website Development Process – The Lifecycle Steps. [Online] Available at [Accessed 21 December 2013] Song, J. H. and Zinkhan, G. M., 2003. Features of Website Design, Perception of Website Quality and Patronage Behavior. University of Geogia, ACME Proceedings WalkerSands., 2013. Characteristics of an Effective Website. [Online] Available at: [Accessed 22 December 2013] Macdonald, M., 2013. 5 Ways Ecommerce Sites Are Killing it With Content Marketing. [Online] Available at: [Accessed 22 December 2013] Matt, M., 2011. Ecommerce website content for SEO – what is it and are you wasting your time? [online] Available at [Accessed 23 December 2013] Velmurugan, M. S., 2009. “Security and trust in e-Business: Problems and prospects,” International Journal of Electronic Business Management, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 151-158. Read More