Romford City Council - Essay Example

ROMFORD COUNCIL INTRODUCTION The Rumford council is the local governing body of the town of Rumford located in South East England. The council is responsible with providing administrative and regulatory services in a number of services in diverse areas such as local economy, community & social issues, Education, housing, environment, employment, tourism, transport, waste & recycling etc. as such, it can be easily seen that the range of activities of the Rumford council are wide and involves issues of great responsibility. With the rise in the growth of the internet and with more and more people relying on internet for every activity such as paying bills, applying for jobs, obtaining legal advice on diverse issues and engaging different services and personnel, the council has felt that it was high time they had a presence on the internet in order to be able to offer better services to the local citizens and provide an additional medium of generating revenue. As such, the Rumford council has requested the development of a website that would showcase the services provided by the city council. TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS The Rumford council entrusted the task of building the website to a software company that began to consider the technical considerations required for designing the website both from a functional and non-functional perspective. As such, this paper will discuss all these aspects in detail. The company specializes in developing web solutions in a number of programming languages such as ASP.NET, PHP and Python. However, in the present context, since the council wished to be provided with an in-house hosting server and maintenance staff, it was decided to develop the solution in ASP.NET, with C# being the development language and SQL Server 2005 providing the needs of the database. The website would be hosted by an Internet Information Services (IIS) server (Dan Cederholm, 2005). The proposed development approach is a standard practice adopted my numerous companies across the world. One of the major considerations while developing the solution was to ensure that the different services provided by the website would function properly under different browsers. As such, it is important to test the different aspects of the website under popular browsers such as Internet Explorer 6, 7 , 8 Beta, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari, which constitute almost 99% of the browsers used today (Thomas A. Powell, 2000). Additionally, the website is also responsible for storing confidential information. The council aims to maintain electronic records of people’s personal information such as social security numbers and other related information, financial information such as credit card numbers, tax returns, health insurance records etc. As such, there is a significant requirement that such information must be protected from being improperly accessible through the website. Firstly, it has been understood that the data flow between the web server and the browser at the client end has to be secured against interception (Steve Krug, 2006). As such, it is proposed to use SSH (Secure socket shell), which will ensure that all data traffic is encrypted and impervious to such illegal access. Secondly, all data stored on the website can only be accessible through a login and authentication mechanism wherein users wishing to access personal data can only do so upon providing a valid username and password. Additionally, data stored in the database will not be available as the database has been secured through the use of a well planned connection string. the website will be monitored by a firewall which will screen all unauthorized attempts to gain entry (Anice Reynolds, 2007). FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS The design of the web application is an important process. It involves determining the overall architecture and then populating it with the required elements and content. Such a process required obtaining specifications. The Rumford council had provided documents prepared previously that contained detailed information on the different responsibilities and domains of activity in which the council operated (Jennifer Niederst Robbins, 2008). Additional documents also detailed information on the features that they required from the website. Apart from allowing valid visitors from accessing information, the council employees also wanted to be able to send emails through the website. A separate section that would enable the council to publish and highlight the information regarding the different events and seminars conducted by the council was also to be developed (Jennifer Niederst Robbins, 2006). Several key people of the council comprising departmental heads had also been interviewed to gain a deeper understanding of the websites requirements. With all the specifications and functional requirements in place, it is aimed to design the website architecture using a standard tool such as Microsoft Visio. Such a graphical Visio representation would enable the development team to have an easy overview of the functionality and enable them to have a stable representation of the requirements. NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS Besides defining the functional requirements of the website, it was also important to determine the non-functional requirements, which would concentrate necessarily on different aspects of the system such as usability, capacity, environment and quality. The website would be accessible through any popular browser and the content was designed ensuring the sizes of the pages were kept to a minimum thereby facilitating quicker page loads (Jakob Nielsen, 2006). Content depending on additional technologies such as flash and JavaScript would also be tested to ensure that they did not cause any significant additional processing overhead. The website would be secured both physically and over the web. Access to the premises of the web servers would be restricted to authorized personnel. Additionally, a dedicated team of web developers would be employed to work on the website and ensure that the council had a team at its disposal to keep the site updated on a daily basis (Nico Macdonald, 2005). CONCLUSION The above paragraphs have described the technical requirements of the website that is intended to be developed for the Rumford city council and have highlighted the procedural requirements that are essential in order to develop and maintain the system. The functional requirements provide an assessment of the different tools and techniques that would be necessary to develop the system, while the non-functional requirements highlight how such procedures should be managed by the concerned personnel. With such a specification, it is hoped that the development team will benefit by devoting time to follow these procedures and delivering a fully working web-base system to the Rumford council. REFERENCES 1. Dan Cederholm (2005), Bulletproof Web Design. New York: New Riders. 2. Jennifer Niederst, Jennifer Niederst Robbins (2006), Learning Web Design. New York: OReilly. 3. Jennifer Niederst Robbins (2008), Web Design in a Nutshell. New York: OReilly. 4. Nico Macdonald (2005), What is Web Design?. London: Rotovision. 5. Thomas A. Powell (2000), Web design: the complete reference. New York: McGraw Hill. 6. Steve Krug (2006), Dont make me think: New YOrk: New Riders. 7. Jakob Nielsen (2006), Designing web usability. University of Michigan. 8. anice Reynolds (2007), The Complete E-Commerce Book. New York: Focal Press.a Read More