WEBSITE EVALUATION FOR FILTON COLLEGE
Introduction
The transmission of the internet has revolutionized the business arena. The use of the Internet is changing high-tech marketing overnight while different industries have been trying to use it as part of their marketing strategy. It does not only reconfigured the way different firms do business and the way the consumers buy goods and services but it also become instrumental in transforming the value chain from manufacturers to retailers to consumers, creating a new retail distribution channel (Donthu & Garcia, 1999). Website development is a powerful tool used by different business organizations around the world. It is defined as the process of achieving business objectives utilizing electronic communications technology.
In addition, the Internet has brought about many changes to the world, particularly on how contemporary businesses are being operated. Due to this technological progress, product development became faster and better and business processes are more systematized. Indeed, the introduction of the internet to several industries has paved the way for greater progress in the future.
The complexities of achieving business success through increased efficiency, effectiveness and competitiveness, combined with innovative applications of the online marketing or the Internet, has heightened the awareness of both the internet and business managers towards more strategically oriented approaches for choosing business strategies (Luftman, Lewis & Oldach, 1993). In any business organization, the core responsibility of the management is to ensure the consistency of its stakeholders’ relationships, to establish that the planned output can be achieved with the planned inputs of labour, capital, and materials. For each of these relationships, there is a corresponding financial flow.
With the advent of internet, more and more organization is trying to use this as part of their business strategy and educational institutions are never an exemption. Primarily, the main goal of this paper is to provide a report on the evaluation of two existing websites which include online enrolment. Further, the discussion will also include a brief description of different web technologies available and attempts to assess which of these tools will be appropriate to be used by the Filton College.
Evaluation of 2 Existing Websites
The World Wide Web (WWW) site or more commonly known as the website is regarded as the collection or compilation of web pages, i.e. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and/or Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) documents which are accessible via HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) on the Internet, all publicly available in existence encompass World Wide Web. Many individuals, business organisation and other groups are trying to create or establish their own website for any purpose they have. The website that must be designed should adhere to the interest of the internet user and it must meet the needs of the user from all aspects (Horn, 2003).
Web designing and developing is difficult since there are many factors that must be considered in order to make the website more efficient. In this report the two websites that will be assessed includes of Nottingham Trent University’s website (www.ntu.ac.uk) and the website of City University London (www.city.ac.uk). These websites will be assessed in terms of design rules, the software used. In addition, these will be assessed in terms of users, purposes, and structure of sites, graphical design, environment and browsers.
Evaluation of Nottingham Trent University (www.ntu.ac.uk)
When creating a website it is important that a web developer or designer should be able to adhere to the web designing rules, so as to ensure that the website created will be accessible. There are five basic rules that must be met in web designing: the website created must be easy to read, easy to navigate and easy to find. In addition, the layout and design of the web must be consistent throughout the site and the website should be quick to download.
The first website to be evaluated is the Nottingham Trent University’s website which is www.ntu.ac.uk. It can be said that the website of the NTU adheres to the first rule because all the written information within the website is easy to be read and understand. Herein, the developed website for NTU has been able to choose the best text and background which makes the users to easily read and comprehend what was the website wanted to imply.
In terms of navigation, it seems that the NTU website has been able to meet the requirements of having an easy to navigate site. Herein, all the hyperlinks established by the NTU site is clear enough to be understood by the users or visitors. In addition, the graphic images like tabs or buttons can be easily read because the developer of such website has labelled it clearly. The NTU website has been able to carefully and meticulously choose colours, backgrounds and textures for easy navigation. In addition, the website of NTU has also been able to follow the rules of providing link colours to have a distinction between those unvisited links and those mostly visited links. For example, the online enrolment link of this website has used blue text to be easily seen by the students who would avail the service of the institution.
The next design rule is the easiness of the website to be found. It is important that when developing a website, one of the goals of the web designers is to make create a website that would be easy to access and find over the internet. There are thousands of organizations that are now creating their own website; hence, it is important that the site created must be unique and distinctive. In line with the NTU website, it can be said that the site has been able to meet the third rule of having a website that is easy to find. Herein, the company make it sure that their site will be available both online and offline.
To be able to make the website available to all and to be able to promote the website to all the users and possible customers, the company had used different search engines including Google, Yahoo and others. In addition, the website of NTU has also been able to use easy to access contact information. In terms of consistency, the NTU website has been consistent throughout the website. In order to make the NTU website a user friendly, the web designers has used software other than the standard HyperTExt Mark-Up Language. The website is being operated under NTU. The main purpose of this website is to provide information regarding the services offered by NTU, including online enrolment system that the institution had established.
The possible users of the website are visitors and students who would want to avail the services offered by the University. Herein, the users may easily access all the information regarding NTU and the best things that NTU can offer for their educational needs. Through the website, even students from different parts of the world may enrol at the company through its online enrolment system. Herein, the students are given the opportunity to book their reservations online. The website also provides information on how the enrolees can pay for tuition fees or accommodation fees. All the data that the students or enrolees are given are being protected and secured through encryption.
Evaluation of City University London (www.city.ac.uk)
As mentioned, there are five basic rules that must be considered when designing or developing a website. This part of the paper will be the evaluation the City University London’s website. In observation, the website of CUL has not been able to adhere to the first rule because the information and the label of the links are not readable. Herein, the developed website for CUL uses colours which is very light that all the texts cannot be read easily. It also uses small texts that the user cannot easily understand such link.
In terms of navigation, it seems that the CUL website has been able to meet the requirements of having an easy to navigate page or site. Herein, all the hyperlinks established by the NTU site is clear enough to be understood by the users or visitors, although it’s not that readable as compared to the first website because of the text colours. In addition, the graphic images like tabs or buttons can are also unreadable; it seems that the web designer does not give emphasis to the second rule of web designing. The NTU website does not been able to carefully select colours, backgrounds and textures for easy navigation. The CUL website does not also follow the rules of providing link colours to have a distinction between those unvisited links and those mostly visited links. They only used one colour which is blue.
The next design rule that must be considered is the easiness of the website to be found. It is one of the important rules to follow in order to promote the website among different users. In line with the website of City University London, it can be noted that the site has been able to meet the third rule of having a website that is easy to find. Herein, the company make it sure that their site will be available in the internet to make users be aware of the website’s existence.
In order for CUL to make their designed website available to internet users the university had used different search engines including Google, Yahoo, AOL and others. In addition, the CUL website has also been able to use easy to access contact information. And with regards to consistency, the web layout and design of CUL has been consistent throughout the website.
The website of City University London had used 128- bit encryption for its server security. The website is being operated with the help of the Centre for Human Computer Interaction design. The main purpose of this website is to provide information regarding the services offered by the City University London, including the online enrolment site to be used by the students who wants to avail such services. Like the website of NTU, the possible users of the website are visitors and students who would want to avail the services offered by the University. Herein, the users may easily access all the information regarding CUL for the students’ or users’ educational needs. Through the website, even students from different parts of the world may enrol at the company through its online enrolment system. In this manner, the students are given the opportunity to book their reservations online. In the website of the university, they include an enrolment form for students which include payment details and other personal information needed.
Different Web Technologies
HyperText Markup Language
In creating a website, it is equally important to consider the web technologies to be used. The following are the web technologies that can be used when designing or developing a website. Fundamental to the Web is HTML, or hypertext Markup language. Devised by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN at the beginning of the 1990s, HTML was intended to be open formatting language that would display pages in any browser capable of recognising that language. As the Web became more successful, so the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was established to oversee future developments of the standard: each new version is designed to downgrade as elegantly as possible; that is, when used well, older browsers ignore elements that they cannot interpret (Powell, 2001; Whittaker 2002).
Fundamental to HTML is the element; that is, a tag indicated by angular brackets that may include a number of attributes, or modifiers affecting how an element is formatted. Typically at present, most but not all elements have an opening and closing tag (something that has been addressed by XHTML): for example, a web page usually begins and ends with the tags, the closing tag indicated by the use of a forward slash.
The first version of HTML was intended only to display text with some basic formatting elements such as headers and paragraphs, as well as the ability to link to other documents. The demand quickly arose for images, and HTML 2.0 outlined the basic standards for formatting text, linking and adding images to pages. The next important standard, HTML 3.0 (modified shortly afterwards as 3.2), added the ability to format pages using tables, as well as the first steps towards the use of cascading style sheets (see below), developments that were taken further by HTML 4.0, which also included layers, absolute positioning and some dynamic effects (Whittaker, 2002).
HTML is relatively simple to learn although web pages soon become very complex, particularly when designing with modern web editors such as Dreamweaver or GoLive. Pages are typically divided into two parts: a header (indicated by the element) that includes meta-information about the page—its title, tags describing content and so on—and the body (defined by the element).
XHTML, XML and other advances to HTML
Although HTML has served the Web well, providing a simple and resilient language to format pages and connect documents, it has been pushed in a number of ways that its original inventor Berners-Lee could not have foreseen. The successor to ENQUIRE was intended for text only, or primarily text-based documents, but it is being used increasingly to handle multimedia sites and powerful databases. At the same time, the personal computer, which Berners-Lee reasonably saw as the main, indeed, the only, client of the Web in the early 1990s, has been joined by a multitude of devices, including personal digital assistants (PDAs), web-ready television sets and even mobile phones, all of which access the Web in different ways.
XHTML
Early in 2000, the W3C, the body responsible for Web standards, recommended XHTML (or extended HTML) to be used on websites. The main difference made by XHTML is that rules now matter: whereas previously browsers would ignore poor Markup (for example, missing tags), this will not be the case with browsers that comply with strict XHTML standards. Because there are so many websites, many of them with mistakes that require a forgiving browser, it is likely that for the foreseeable future versions of Netscape or Internet Explorer will remain backwards compatible. None the less, implementing rules is important to the future of HTML: mobile phone or web-TV browsers, for example, display web pages very differently from those designed for PCs, and establishing how a page will display in various browsers will become increasingly important.
As such, XHTML pages must have what is known as a ‘doctype indicator’, an instruction at the beginning of the page which tells the browser what version of HTML it will use, and all relevant elements indicating the Markup type. For the moment, HTML is the main formatting language on the Web, but this may not be the case in the future.
Style sheets
As web designers have sought more eye-popping sites, so HTML has been pushed to extremes as a tool for layout and design. Another problem for site designers is that it is unusual for a single individual to combine the talents required to create content for pages and present them on a page in an appealing fashion. One solution to this problem has emerged in the form of cascading style sheets (CSS), Markup rules for text and positioning that offer more control over layout. Because such style sheets may be nested one inside another, they are referred to as ‘cascading’, and CSS creates a presentation style for a particular HTML element. CSS defines how different elements appear on the web page. These elements include headers, text and links.
First is the ASCII, this technology stands for American Standard Code Information Exchange. Herein, the principal character set encoding of present-day computers. It uses a code for representing English characters, in which each letter has a counter numerical value from 0 to 127. The next web technology is the Active Server Pages (ASP). This is a dynamically ad animatedly created web page that usually use JavaScript or VB Script code. In this, if a browser requests an ASP site, the web server produces a page with HTML c ode and sends its back to its respective browser.
Next is the Cold Fusion (CFM), a format that allows a web developer to link and connect databases and spreadsheets to the webpage which is considered to be much easier through HTML coding. On the other hand the Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML) is a tag-based server scripting language for building web applications. Cold Fusion Markup Language utilised a syntax which is closely look like XML and HTML. XML Another important web technology that can be considers id the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). Common Gateway Interface is known as any program, which is designed to accept and restore or return data which conforms to the specification set under CGI. This program can be written in any other programming languages such as C, Java, Visual Basics and Perl. The CGI programs are known as the most common way for Web servers to connect dynamically with users. Web technology also includes the Dynamic HyperText Markup Language (DHTML). This refers to the new extension of HTML that allows the web page to respond to use input without sending any requests to the web server.
Recommendation
The World Wide Web, also known as the Internet, is the most renowned hypertext system and because of this there are two standard hypertext technologies that can be considered aside from those mentioned above. Two of its standards are the HyperText Transfer Protocol or HTTP and the HyperText Markup Language or HTML. HTTP gives the specifications on how the browser and the server send information to each other. HTML, on the other hand is a way of encoding the information so that it may be displayed on different devices. The hypertext capabilities of the web include support for constructing and modularizing information on a nonlinear format, the convenience of making references, and the capability to keep a number of information threads alive all at once (Heller, 1990). In creating a website, these two standards must be considered the most.
Today, the two-tier client/server architecture such as the HTTP and HTML is still the widest implemented computer architecture. An application is considered two-tier when database services are detached from an application so that they can run independently on another computer (Fastie, 1999). Client/server software architectures were developed in the 1980s based on the file server architecture design (Sadoski, 1997). They are able to improve the usability, scalability, and flexibility in computer sharing infrastructure (Schussel, 1996). Moreover, the architecture needed only small operator intervention. For many years, the set-up of this model seemed ideal – a Windows/GUI-based PC manages the application and presentation activities at the client level, whereas the server accesses the database. Such scenario seemed to be suitable for Internet application. Several advantages are offered by the fact that data are being managed and stored in a central location. First, every item of data stored in the central location can be accessed and worked on by all users. Second, security and business rules may be defined only once by the server, and, thus, be enforced in all users. Next, relational database servers optimize network traffic through returning only the needed data of the application. Then, costs of hardware are minimized. Finally, maintenance tasks including backing up and/or restoring data are cut down since they can now focus only on the central server.
Conclusion
In creating the website, web designers have to consider many things web technologies and designs. If the web designs adhere to the set standards of website development, then the website can be considered as accessible and readable. Next to consider is the credibility of your website as a vital component. Thus, you need to state your phone, fax or 800 numbers, head office address, offices’ location as the essentials. The addresses and contact numbers must stay accurate. With regards to the site, the designer would need to affirm the warranties, guarantees, methods of the delivery of the services, terms and conditions and the privacy policy. However, the amount of information given regarding the company will also depends on the objectives that the organization wants to achieve. It is easy to presuppose much knowledge on the viewer’s part, yet it is wiser to presuppose that people or users have drawn their interest in all the aspects of the services, from the basic information onward. The companies which are sincere with the marketing through the website extend to the vast span of expecting and responding the questions, motivating interest and raise the level of the viewer’s comfort.
Developing the website can be arranged into six steps: defining the goal which requires a clear goal so as to decide on the appropriate style, appearance and features; overall appearance which should reflect on the corporate culture of such business, which entails the selection of colours, use of logos, corporate images and the format design; navigability of the website, this includes the header, footer and side-menu bars which is attained by the use of every part of every webpage to link to equivalent pages and which aims to provide the visitors timesaving browsing through the website; visuals which become the focus of the process in developing the site along with the overall appearance, approved sampler and the graphics; content which shapes the foundation of the website and which can be helpfully organized into a site map that arranges the content into groups in which lays the path the visitors take as they browse the website; and finally is the site management which refers to the regular attention spent for the review of the design, use of graphics, maintenance of the site for the visitors to frequently return to. Once the website is functional, it will always aspire to keep its relevance most especially the time-sensitive information.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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