Commercial Web Site Development

e-business Strategy Assignment 1: commercial web site development
*** COMMERCIAL WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT ***
For e-business Strategy class

< Michal Kasprowicz >
Analysis written by:

< Georgi Butev >
Start Date:
< 28 January 2008 >
Due Date:
< 26 March 2008 >
Page ‫٭‬ 1 Georgi Butev

*** Table of Contents ***
Web site development | 3

welcome text
terms and conditions
intellectual property
products description
post-sale relationship
Market Research | 8
school environment
friends and family
peers
accidental visitors
find and describe competition
SWOT analysis
Financial planning and budgeting | 10
resources
time
money
Marketing planning and visitors tracking | 13
marketing activities
google analytics
Launching the web site | 16
beta-testing
bugs
Planing sales | 18
forecast
end-result
Marketing activities | 19
Weekly analysis presentation | 20
Conclusion | 21
Appendix 1 | 28
Appendix 2 | 29
Appendix 3 | 30
Appendix 4 | 31

*** Web Site Development ***
Web development is a broad term for any activities related to developing a web site for the World
Wide Web or an Intranet. This can include e-commerce business development, web design, web
content development, client-side/server-side coding, and web server configuration. However,
among web professionals, "web development" usually refers only to the non-design aspects of
building web sites, e.g. writing mark-up and coding. Web development can range from developing
the simplest static single page of plain text to the most complex web-based internet applications,
electronic businesses, or social network services.
Web developing can be split into several important areas:
1. HTML
2. CSS
3. JavaScript
4. Flash
Initial
The usage of JavaScript and Flash was not implemented because we didn't have anyone enough
experienced person amongst the team to work with the technology.
To link the two polls and e-cards sections (two main commercial sections of the site) I was
assigned to develop a home page which would have links to the rest of the web site.
I decided to use a popular and appropriate web site template which I will later edit and re-design to
fit the purposes of the assignment. Here is the the link where you can find the original design by
Andreas Vinklund - < http://andreasviklund.com/templates/ >

Final HTML + CSS designed web page
Further editing
Finishing the page coding was half the work done because there had to be additional editing done
not so much in the design but rather what the clients see first. Below are the areas I and the rest of
the team worked on.
1. welcome text
2. terms and conditions
3. about
4. intellectual property
5. product description
6. post-sale relationship
Welcome text
My initial idea of what the welcome text was to write something about me, the team, the project
and Prague College. After a discussion in the class I understood that a welcome text should be a
mini-marketing idea something like
a slogan, banner or a company logo.

Since we didn't have a company logo or banner we decided to write an ad text that would best
describe the product and our goal in a client's friendly manner. Oliver said that there shouldn't be
any text because the visitors wouldn't bother to read it anyway. To which I partly agree because I
think there should be at least something there.
Terms and conditions
I formed my suggestion of useful terms and services policy based on what other common web
sites have done. I have deleted the useless parts and add some parts that are particularly
useful to us - like the part where the web site should be treated according to the EU law.
The full text of which can be found here - < http://ecommerce.ic.cz/terms-g.html >
About
We had to compile and write something for the About section. I thought that writing of us
and what we do is already done on the home page. That's why I decided to write an
explanation of how e-cards work. With a simple intro and five step simplified approach.
The full text of which can be found here - < http://ecommerce.ic.cz/about-g.html >
Intellectual Property
Intellectual property (IP) is a legal field that refers to creations of the mind such as musical,
literary, and artistic works; inventions; and symbols, names, images, and designs used in
commerce, including copyrights, trademarks, patents, and related rights. Under intellectual
property law, the holder of one of these abstract "properties" has certain exclusive rights to the
creative work, commercial symbol, or invention which is covered by it.
To be in accordance with EU and US law the easiest way I thought was to include the name and
additional information about the author of a certain copyrighted material on the web site.
I have done so in two places:

1. the web page template on the very first page there is a link to the web site of the author of
template I redesigned for out home page.
2. e-cards images there were few copyrighted images that I used in the electronic cards
section. I listed the authors and gave them credit on the same page.

Product description
The product description is usually a welcome text and a brief explanation of functionality. In our
case we had covered pretty much everything in the welcome text. In addition we didn't have to do
any marketing tricks and cool attractive overviews of the service we offer because using
electronic cards and voting in polls is pretty straight forward.
Post-sales relationship
Post sale relationship is the piece of thank we give to our clients for participating and above all
using our service. In our case we felt that a simple thank you for your purchase is perfectly fine.
However towards the end of the class I understood that such a relationship is not only a casual
thanks but really a further business strategy to lure clients to come back to the web site.
If we had the time to do it I believe we could have implemented a newsletter function. This means
that whenever a client sends an e-card we would store his / her e-mail in the database a send him /
her newsletter emails. These emails will notify the client of new features, images, polls, design and
others with which we can tempt him or her to come back and use our service again. Thus not only
generating a bigger income of visitors and establishing ourselves but maybe a bigger profit.
The polls
Everyone of the team had to create at least three polls. Below are my ideas:
1. Why George Bush invaded Iraq? I was
hoping to attract people's attention by
provocation.
2. What comes first? (egg or chicken) This is a

centuries old question which everyone loves so I
thought I clients will love it.

3. What is your favourite Czech beer? We

study in the Czech Republic and our Pilsner
Staropramen
clients mostly come from the same place
Gambrinus
so I thought such a question would
Budwar
interest them and spark a discussion with
Frisco
their friends which can also come to the Kelt
web site.
I think that I did come up with interesting and entertaining questions. The others from the team did
so too. The total votes that my polls received was average which is good in my opinion. The most
voted question was Where would you like to live? which tips my mind that our customers were
mostly international and they were interested in questions like that.
The electronic cards
An e-card is similar to a postcard or greeting card, with the primary difference being it is created
using digital media instead of paper or other traditional materials. E-cards are made available by
publishers usually on various Internet sites, where they can be sent to a recipient, usually via e-
mail. E-cards are digital "content", which makes them much more versatile than traditional
greeting cards.
As with the polls everyone had to create a category and upload some electronic cards. I decided to
be a bit more experimental, open-minded and funny. That's why I created one category called beers
and one category called crazy animals.
After some thinking about it I may have been wrong about the beer category because people send
cards to their friends of places and unseen things. However one of my cards is among the most
popular sent electronic cards from the web site.
The reason why I created the crazy animals category was because I thought it would be great fun
and rather hilarious to send pets doing shenanigans rather than sending some boring scapes of a
green fields or grey castles.
beer e-card crazy animals e-card

*** Market Research ***
Market research is the process of systematically gathering, recording and analysing data and
information about customers, competitors and the market. Its uses include to help create a business
plan, launch a new product or service, fine tune existing products and services, and expand into
new markets. Market research can be used to determine which portion of the population will
purchase a product/service, based on variables like age, gender, location and income level.
To properly determine what audience we should target each one of us was asked to do a
presentation and include his / her opinions about it. The presentation includes the following topics:
1. friends & family
2. peers
3. accidental visitors
4. additional information
What I didn't include in the presentation at the time was competition and SWOT analysis. Both of
them are extremely important to the market research process. Some companies even employee
people to constantly snoop and monitor the activities of the competitors. Our case was a bit
different because our project was a college one but since we all dealt with the same thing free
ecards I had to look at what the other guys are doing.
Competition
Major alternatives for sending electronic cards are (note that searching on the internet for such
service is tricky because there are more than 6 million such web sites. The few listed below support
English language and have similar goal):
Blue Mountain
Hallmark
123 greetings
eGreetings
Card Fountain

SWOT analysis
From my personal journal dating 30th of February.
After the official launch of the web site we decided that monitoring our e-commerce web
site with the help of Google Analytics is a good idea. It will show us who our customers
are, where they come from, and what time do they spend on the site.
The result was somewhat unsurprising - only we have used the web site and its service.
That's why we decided to apply SWOT analysis.
Unfortunately the group found more weaknesses than strengths. Below were my suggestions:
S --- content, professional approach.
W --- design, lack of brand, back-up.
O --- ...
T --- competitors, sensitive customers, bad hosting service.
The rest of the group thought of other S - free service, simplicity, and pioneering.
As for Weaknesses - limited time and resources. They saw lots of O to which I can't
fully agree because of the type of the project (school) and the economic / political
environment (CZ / EU). At the end Prof. Alexander surprised us by dropping failure as
a potential Treat.
We discussed whether or not we can fix some of our weaknesses. Apparently the limited
time and resources cannot be fixed but some of the lucky ones were - design, brand
and back-up. I agree that backing-up is accomplished but I hardly see any volunteers
to invest time in a new web design and money in better name.

*** Financial Planning and Budgeting ***
Financial planning is the task of determining how a business will afford to achieve its strategic
goals and objectives. Usually, a company creates a Financial Plan immediately after the vision and
objectives have been set. The Financial Plan describes each of the activities, resources, equipment
and materials that are needed to achieve these objectives, as well as the time frames involved.
Usually a financial plan consist of:
1. Assessment of business environment

2. Confirm the business vision and objectives
3. Identify the types of resources needed to achieve the objectives
4. Quantify the amount of resources (labor, equipment, materials)
5. Calculate the total cost of each type of resource
6. Summarise the costs to create a budget
7. Identify any risks and issues with the budget set
However in a project like ours there are three main areas to discuss:
1. available resources
2. time left
3. money matters
Available resources
All the available resource we could use were mainly software, hardware and personal skills related:
1. Software:
○ Windows XP, Mac OS X and Ubuntu GG (Linux)
○ Microsoft Office and Open Office
○ Adobe imaging software used for making and editing images
○ Firefox, Opera and IE internet browsers
○ Fire FTP used to connect and transfer data with the host server
○ PS Pad used to connect, transfer and edit PHP and HTML files on the host server

2. Hardware
○ Computers
○ Colour printers
3. Skills
○ web development is essential but common skill amongst the team.
○ business experience is essential but only one team member was comfortable with it.
○ marketing experience is of great importance unfortunately as far as I can tell few of us
knew what it means and how it should be applied.
Time left
Time is always important for electronic businesses. The minimal time to develop an e-commerce
web site is about an year. Sometimes six months are need for web site build, additional three
months are needed for the first order and more three months to pick-up a pace.
We had two months top. In that time we had to build the web site, market it and get a steady pace
of visitors. Below I've listed some of the more important activities:
* send e-mails to friends

* create e-cards section
* promote in social web site * analyse results
* create polls section
* promote in IMs, blogs and forums * pick-up steady pace
* create home page
* marketing campaign
1 month 15 days 15 days
2 months
total

Money matters
In order to start a business electronic or not the team should prepare a budget which to follow if
they want to be successful. In case of miscalculating the budgeting the company will have to step
out of business, the team will have to be fired and the project will fail.
We have agreed on the following budget:
Products Prices in Czech Crowns (Kc)

beer cards 100
cars cards 80
crazy animals 95
flowers 110
places 80
sport 90
swiss 75
world capitals 85
votes 200
Cost of technical implementation and maintenance:
Action Price in Czech Crowns (Kc)

Programming 30 000 once & 5 000
Design 25 000 once
Domain and hosting 5 000 monthly
Marketing 5 000 monthly
Wages 20 000 per employee
The result and break even point are discussed in the conclusion chapter.

*** Marketing Planning and Visitors Tracking ***
A marketing plan is a written document that details the necessary actions to achieve one or more
marketing objectives. It can be for a product or service, a brand or a product line. A marketing plan
may a part of an overall business plan. Solid marketing strategy is the foundation of a well-written
marketing plan. While a marketing plan contains a list of actions, a marketing plan without a sound
strategic foundation is of little use.
Market Audit
The first step in the marketing planning process is that of conducting the marketing audit. The
materials collected for the audit come from:
1. Who are the customers?

2. What are their characteristics?
3. What differentiate them from other customers?
4. What are their needs?
5. What do they expect product to do?
6. What are their attitudes?
7. What are their buying intentions?
Visitors Tracking
The way to find out the answer to those questions in electronic business visitors tracking is applied.
This sometimes is referred to as web analytics. Web analytics is the study of the behaviour of web
site visitors. In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected
from a web site to determine which aspect of the website work towards the business objectives.
We employed two methods of collecting such data:
1. Google analytics
2. Web page log (for electronic cards)

Google analytics
Google analytics is web based software that when implemented in one's web site tracks mostly
anything that the visitor, customer does. Below I've listed few of the benefits that convinced us to
use it in our electronic business web site:
1. Free
2. Sophisticated analytics collects huge amount of data and then presents it to the user in a
pleasant easy to understand manner.
3. Easy to use
4. Scalable for any size site.
5. Integrated with Adwords
6. Tracks all campaigns
7. Safe
Above all of course we needed to collect relevant data from our visitors. Here are some of the most
important, used and analysed data from our Google analytics account.
1. Visitors overview
2. Visitors map overlay
3. Visitors site usage
4. New and Returning visitors
5. Visitors language
6. Count of unique visitors
7. Count of page views
8. Count of the spend time on the web site by visitors.
9. Visitors loyalty
10. Depth of visit
11. Various data like:
○ internet browsers
○ operating systems
○ flash and Java support
○ connection speed
12. Traffic sources
13. Content visited
14. Content drill down
15. Bounce rate
16. Goals

Using this functionality offered by Google analytics we found out some interesting information
about our visitors / customers, such as:
● Visitors mainly come from the Czech Republic and Mexico.

● There is an equal ration between new comers and returning visitors.
● English and Spanish are the languages most of our clients speak.
● The time spend on the web site was a 5 minute average.
● We had low bounce rate.
● The loyalty of our visitors was poor. They were interested to visit the site once.
● The visitors visited up to three pages.
● Mostly used internet browsers were Internet Explorer and Firefox.
● Mostly used operating systems were Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.
● Our users have broadband internet connection.
● The visitors first vote, then send an e-card and then read the about' and 'terms of service'.
Server Log
Both of our web applications (polls and ecards) had an incorporated tracking script which log
visitors activities and then presented the gathered data to us.
With the help of those scripts we were able to measure the success of our products and decide
which one to leave, which one to edit / redesigned and which one to remove all together.
Below are some of the findings we stumbled upon and were important to know:
● Total cards sent / polls voted
● Cards sent / Polls votes this week
● Most popular cards / polls
● Most popular categories
Evaluate marketing strategy
Based on that findings we could successfully implement and develop our marketing strategy:
1. Products
○ developing new products
○ adding new features
○ changing the design
2. Price
○ budgeting
○ deciding how to meet
competitive pricing.

*** Launching the Web Site ***
Without a doubt developing an electronic business web site such as ours takes a lot of time but
there are aspects of it that sometimes are not being notices until the official launch of the web site.
These aspects turn into bugs and issues for most of the time. And these issues may not only harm
the web site but the whole business too. For example if we have problems with our electronic
payment method we would loose the trust of our clients and ultimately the company's 'name' will
suffer.
In order to deal with an unexpected issues the web site is tested by each and everyone of us and a
critical feedback is gathered. We divided the testing of the web site into three categories just for
effectiveness sake. They are as follows:
● design
● functionality
● content
We decided to discuss the web site little foibles in class and act on issues rather than writing
lengthy time consuming documents that need to be gathered and analysed.
Design
There's a general dissatisfaction with the web design of the three main pages. The polls are a bit
too old-fashioned looking, the e-cards script was a bit too grey and the background of the home
page was a bit too colourful. As a result of a discussion I slightly altered the design of the home
page and the polls section was refreshed with another more pleasant and appropriate web
application. Unfortunately the e-cards script was not changed and it is still grey and a bit gloomy.
The reason why this issues was not dealt with is because of resource and time limitations.

Functionality
The biggest complain about the functionality of the web site came from dissatisfaction with the e-
cards site. Not to forget though is that we postponed the official web site launch because the voting
section of the web site didn't behave properly. Another major caveat was that the link representing
the electronic card was not working because we didn't configure the script in relation to the host
server (ecommerce.ic.cz). Fortunately we
dealt successfully with the problems and
fixed the issues.
Content
There isn't any beta testing of content but rather a review of what is written and whether it is
appropriate for the web site and for the outlined business purposes. One of the main issue that the
team heatedly discussed was the following question.
The argument was that a lot of Americans live in Prague and they may find it offensive. Even
though the question is controversial and may spark a lot of interest it is a bit risky. The end result of
the discussion was that the question will promote more visits and customers. Even if some visitors
wouldn't like the poll they will be few. That was actually proven by Google analytics which showed
that we have little visits from the U.S.
As a creator of the question I believe it is more fun and the targeted audience will like it. Of course
this is based on the research I did on the targeted audience.

*** Planning Sales ***
Planning the sales seems to be the easiest activity as far as I can tell. Firstly because one estimates
how many products will be bought. It is easier for me or the others to just tell a figure but they
should be based on certain information about our clients.
What's more giving just a number will not help the team to plan the budget. And if the team of
economist do not have a realistic image of sales they do not know how to form the budget. And if
the budgeting is unclear than the company will most probably fail.
Fortunately we have Google analytics on our side which will help us with the estimation. Tracking
visitors, their actions and the sales. This means that we would have a real-time log but not a long-
term prediction. However there is certain trend, peaks and lows and just a normal pace of the
visitors and sales.
The class decided that at

the of the class we will have
more than 100 sales.
The count of sales at the end of the class was more than 150 sales. We had clearly underestimated
our sales. The reason for this is that we based our forecast on personal assumption.
To see that there is more professional, accurate and trusted forecast I had to calculate the sales
based on the following formula, which returned the following result:
The result shows that we should plan a bigger budget because in the future we'll have more sales
which mean more revenue.
visits per day = x

peaks once a month = a x = 10
lows once a moth = b a = 20
forecast = y b=5
y = x*30 + a - b
y = 315

*** Marketing Activities ***
Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying
customer demands profitability. It means put yourself in the customer's shoes but not forget to look
at the current market.
The main marketing activity one should undertake is connection and chat with people, peer, friends
and family about the product one is offering. In that sense I told some of my friends and members
of my family about the web site I am a team of and what we are doing. I tried to get them as
interested in the product as I can. The main issue for me here is that selling your services and
products to your best mates is unethical and unprofessional. For example if you sell cars how many
of your friends and family members will be interested? Not much that is for sure.
That is why there are other marketing activities that one should take in mind for making his or her
electronic business popular.
● Posters
● E-Mail Spam
● Leaflets / Flyers
● Newsletter
● Blogs
● IM-ing
● Forums
● E-Mails
● Radio
● Television
● Press
● Special events
● Freebies
● Promotions
● Balloons and other related goods.
I didn't send any emails or spam to my friends because I think it is a bit unethical but I created a
poster which a hang at the second floor where I hoped student will see and participate. I also did
some blog and forum campaign where I tried to promote our web site.
The posters are appended at the end.

*** Weekly Analysis Presentation ***
follow the attachment

*** Conclusion ***
This chapter is a summary of the commercial web site development project analysis. I look at each
phase of the development process and evaluate whether we had accomplished success or we have
failed. At the end I write of possible improvements and suggestions.
Web Site Dev

Design
I think that the design of the web site was well discussed and appropriately tuned where needed.
The home page that I created complies with the W3C standards for HTML and CSS coding. The
graphics are not overwhelming and the overall look of things is simple, clear and straight to the
point.
My suggestion is that with enough time and participation the design of the electronic cards section
and polls section can be freshened-up a little bit. As there are more young customers visiting the
web site we should use popular Web 2.0 colour palate.
Welcome text
I am afraid that even though we spent a lot of time discussing and editing the welcome text it is not
particularly accurate and useful. It even fails to comply with the SEO analysis. I think that the
problem is the uneven and odd fusion between the three main pages of the web site. From a SEO
point of view we can put everything on the first home page but that wouldn't be ecstatically
pleasing and a bit of a mess which would irritate the visitors.
Product description
The problems that we had with the welcome text fell upon the product description, too. It is at best
ill written and doesn't make much sense. It doesn't matter if it is 2 bullet points or 5 paragraphs of
text the issues will still remain. If it is too short it's not professional. On the other hand if it is long
no one will ever read it. Making it fun and entertaining doesn't inspire much confidence either.
As a suggestion of how to possibly improve both the welcome text and product description I think
that we should have placed two illustrated images showing the polls and e-cards.
fail success

About and terms and conditions
I genuinely believe that we did good job in creating both. The about section has all the information
the visitor would need to know about / contact us. The terms and condition are always a legal
precaution but I think our visitors won't be bored reading them because the terms are straight to the
point and include all the necessary legal cases. If by some unfortunate happening a visitor wants to
sue us I would be glad to present the terms of service in the court.
As a suggestion I think we may put some striped-down version of both the about and terms section
on the home page. Thus people will ignore them less.
Intellectual property
All the materials that are available on the web site are credited. Some more apparent other not so
but if someone wants to see the author and intellectual rights owner of a certain art piece he or she
will most certainly find it. For example the home page original design is done by a Swedish web
designer named Vikund. He's name and website are in footer of the first page.
We can slightly improve the way credit is given to the creators of the electronic cards by putting a
bare noticeable watermark with the name of the author on the e-cards.
Post-sales relationship
I afraid we failed to establish a good, perspective and professional post-sales relationship with our
clients. There is no rewarding statement when a visitor is voting in the polls section. In the e-cards
section they are presented with a dry thank you .
That's why I think we should have invested more time writing effective and entertaining thank you
statements in both sections. What's more we could establish a professional electronic business
relationship with our clients by sending them newsletters.
fail success

The e-cards
Contrary to the believe I had at the beginning of the class the e-cards were more time consuming
and boring than the polls were. Even though we spent great amount of effort in finding and
uploading electronic cards to the web site we somehow missed the point.
The offered rival e-card services had categories like holidays, birthday, smiley's, animation, fun
etc. We on the other hand have beer, cars, sports, flowers etc. I'm not saying that people don't send
pictures of beautiful flowers amongst themselves but usually people send exotic sceneries and
hilarious type of post and electronic cards.
Another issues was sending process which was a bit time consuming, sluggish, slow and some
times not working properly. Of course this was due to the fact that the PHP script was free of
charge and yet there was negative feedback and complains received from Oliver. Such an issues
should have been immediately dealt with and fixed.
more cards:
* fun / joke like
* exotic places
My Suggestion
The polls
I am rather satisfied with the polls and voting section contrary to my initial assumption. My initial
assumption was that the polls will be boring political like. But as it turns the team was creative
thinking and was able to come with great, fun, controversial, dreamy and entertaining polls that
people would like. It is a general saying that marketing makes people do what they don't need or
feel like doing. However this was not the case with the polls because I myself enjoyed voting the
polls looking for what other people said about a certain topic.
My Suggestion
Polls with questions that people Polls with question that people
generally wish and dream about heatedly discuss. In other words
Like our popular question where controversial ones. Like my
would you like to live? poll about George Bush and Iraq.

Market Research
Presentation (findings)
I don't think we failed finding out who our audience and visitors will be but more research should
have been applied. My presentation was insufficient providing the real look over what market we
are dealing with. It is like shooting a fish in a barrel you know it's there but it takes you a long
time to shoot it and the business (water) may run out.
There is no other possible suggestion here except that the team should have collected more
information and share their findings with the class.
Competition
Our main goal wasn't to become world leader in sending electronic cards, our goal was to create a
web site competitive enough in a face to face comparison. I think we did spend quite a lot of time
building the web site and as far as functionality sake is concerned I think we are competitive with
the medium-sized rival companies.
We should have pursued the team's great idea of putting videos and flash animation as electronic
cards. Not only the web site would be more fun and exiting but it would be more competitive.
SWOT analysis
I have mixed feelings about the SWOT analysis we applied to our on-line business. On one hand
we did great job of analysing our business strengths and weaknesses. We successfully determined
the possible threats that can fail the company and we successfully determined our future
possibilities for becoming a world wide used web site with millions of visitors.
Unfortunately we did little of dealing with our weaknesses, avoiding the threats and developing the
full potential of the web site (opportunities). I've compiled a small list showing what we expected
and what we did about it.
● W design, lack of brand and back-up data --- these have not been tackled.
● T competitors, sensitive customers and bad hosting service --- these haven't been fixed.
● O we didn't plan becoming world leader in electronic cards sending services.
fail success

My suggestion are as follows:
● Design if our budget allows it we should invest in an experienced web designer who
would re-design the whole web site and give it more freshness and modernness.
● Lack of brand many companies are what they are because of their well known brand. We
should too invest in a better name for our web site and name of the company. Obviously
ecommerce is far too ubiquitous but crazy cards for instance sounds better.
● Back-up data usually implementing a back-up data application costs hundreds of dollars
but in our case we could have been doing it ourselves. Just connect to the host server, select
all, copy and paste in one's personal computer documents.
● Competitors without a doubt we need a lot of time and experience to rival the big
companies but applying a SEO will help us hold-up our position on the market.
● Sensitive customers a message should have been put in the polls section saying that all the
questions are just for fun and they are not meant to upset or offend anyone. If the visitors
can't take a joke they shouldn't be looking.
● Bad hosting service is in my opinion related to back-up sensitive data. The time we would
spend in manually backing-up the web site is justified compared with the problems and
fuzz we would have if some hacker would purge all our data from the host server.
Financial Planning and Budgeting

Resources
The hardware and software resources were absolutely sufficient and satisfying to our needs
throughout the development of the web site. The computers and software that we used was able to
provide the content to a broad audience without having to worry about accessibility.
The only aspect we had with resources was skilled workers . Majority of the team study in IT
Computing and only one member was actively involved with marketing and business. In order to
stay competitive we need to hire staff experienced in the business area.
Time
Although we didn't have sufficient time to finish the development of the web site to the point
where only maintenance is needed I think we allocated the time we had properly. We didn't waste
our team members time with tasks too time consuming that will be of little impact on our on-line
business.
fail success

Money
Our poor performance with budgeting, profit and revenue is because we are small start-up
company just emerging ready to take on the competition but not quite there. Nevertheless such a
poor record would not only mean that the company can't pay bills and wages to its employees. It
also means that we will run out of business if some extreme measures are not being undertaken.
The following is a short representation of our sales:
formula revenue per month

sales of electronic cards visits * average price of cards 150 * 89.75 = 13'462.5 Kc
sales of polls votes * price 100 * 200 = 20'000 Kc
total sales sale of e-cards + sales of polls 33'462.5 Kc
I calculated that our monthly dues are:
● bills = 115'000 Kc
● monthly wage per person = 20'000 Kc
● monthly wage per 5 people = 100'000 Kc
● total amount of money spend for a month = 235'000 Kc
It is more than clear that with such revenue we can only pay-up one of our team member. We
cannot pay neither the bills nor the wages.
There cannot be any other solution to this problem than to increase the sales to a certain value
called break even point. There is no possible way we can reach that point with those sales figure
but if we have:
* 500 sales of
polls
* 1000 sales brake even
of e-cards point

Visitors tracking
The success in visitors tracking was largely due to the usage of Google analytics. This wonderful
tool that requires 5 minutes installation, logs everything possible about our visitors and presents it
in a clear and easy to understand manner. At the beginning I was a bit specious how a free tool can
be so effective but Google plays huge part of electronic business and should not be underestimated.
The e-cards and polls statistics script was of great benefit to our client analysis, too. For example
we saw that the category place was popular and Oliver added another category with pictures of
Switzerland. Another example from the polls section is that I saw the interest in general questions
like what's your favourite colour? and I went and created another poll of general interest - what
come first the egg or the chicken? .
Launching the web site
After two unsuccessful launches of the web site we finally officially started business. This was
only possible and acceptable because it was a college project but in a real environment such a delay
is not acceptable at all. For example if there was an investor that trusted us to start making money
tomorrow but we go on business two weeks later the investor will take out his / her capital.
Even though we fixed vital functionality issues others remain like the gloomy design and random
content. That doesn't mean of course that we should postpone the launch of a web site any time we
run into trouble. First because no money flow into the bank account when the web site isn't
working. Second because we found out about the issues later and there are always content and
functionality to change, edit and enhance.
Planning sales
We successfully planned and estimated the amount of sales. To be honest I so much underestimated
the service that I was thinking of 20 sales total. After some discussion with the team we agreed on
a 100 sales total. Something unrealistic for me at the time but despite the odds we managed to pull
more than hundred sales for less than two months.
Without a doubt this was contributed by Oliver and his friends worldwide. I wasn't that keen on
spamming my friends but maybe in the world of business one should swallow his / her ethical
dilemmas if he or she wants ultimate success.
fail success

*** Appendix 1***

< journals >

*** Appendix 2 ***

< market research presentation >

*** Appendix 3 ***

< posters >

*** Appendix 4 ***

< terms of service >

Commercial Web Site Development

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Commercial Web Site Development

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e-business Strategy Assignment 1: commercial web site development

*** COMMERCIAL WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT ***

For e-business Strategy class

Analysis written by:

Page ‫٭‬ 1 Georgi Butev

*** Table of Contents ***

Web site development | 3

Page ‫٭‬ 2 Georgi Butev

*** Web Site Development ***

Web developing can be split into several important areas:

Page ‫٭‬ 3 Georgi Butev

Final HTML + CSS designed web page

Page ‫٭‬ 4 Georgi Butev

Terms and conditions

I have done so in two places:

Page ‫٭‬ 5 Georgi Butev

2. What comes first? (egg or chicken) This is a

Page ‫٭‬ 6 Georgi Butev

3. What is your favourite Czech beer? We

The electronic cards

beer e-card crazy animals e-card

Page ‫٭‬ 7 Georgi Butev

*** Market Research ***

Page ‫٭‬ 8 Georgi Butev

That's why we decided to apply SWOT analysis.

S --- content, professional approach.

W --- design, lack of brand, back-up.

T --- competitors, sensitive customers, bad hosting service.

Page ‫٭‬ 9 Georgi Butev

*** Financial Planning and Budgeting ***

Usually a financial plan consist of:

1. Assessment of business environment

Page ‫٭‬ 10 Georgi Butev

* send e-mails to friends

1 month 15 days 15 days

Page ‫٭‬ 11 Georgi Butev

We have agreed on the following budget:

Products Prices in Czech Crowns (Kc)

Cost of technical implementation and maintenance:

Action Price in Czech Crowns (Kc)

Page ‫٭‬ 12 Georgi Butev

*** Marketing Planning and Visitors Tracking ***

1. Who are the customers?

We employed two methods of collecting such data:

Page ‫٭‬ 13 Georgi Butev

Page ‫٭‬ 14 Georgi Butev

● Visitors mainly come from the Czech Republic and Mexico.

Evaluate marketing strategy

Page ‫٭‬ 15 Georgi Butev

*** Launching the Web Site ***

Page ‫٭‬ 16 Georgi Butev

Page ‫٭‬ 17 Georgi Butev

*** Planning Sales ***

The class decided that at

visits per day = x

Page ‫٭‬ 18 Georgi Butev

*** Marketing Activities ***

The posters are appended at the end.

Page ‫٭‬ 19 Georgi Butev

*** Weekly Analysis Presentation ***

follow the attachment

Page ‫٭‬ 20 Georgi Butev

*** Conclusion ***

* COMMERCIAL WEB SITE DEVELOPMENT *

* Table of Contents *

* Web Site Development *

* Market Research *

* Financial Planning and Budgeting *

* Marketing Planning and Visitors Tracking *

* Launching the Web Site *

* Planning Sales *

* Marketing Activities *

* Weekly Analysis Presentation *

* Conclusion *

* Appendix 1*

* Appendix 2 *

* Appendix 3 *

* Appendix 4 *