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It is also advised to place high priority tasks in a prominent
location such as the upper middle of the page. The highest
priority task for ABC Travel, the flight-booking engine, was
therefore placed in the upper middle of the page. It is recommended
not to include internal company information on the external
website, so the internal website that is used to update the
commercial website will therefore not be linked to the site
at all.
Links: It is important to differentiate between
text and links so the users can scan through the text and
find links quickly. The links should not be generic such as
`Click Here' or `More', rather they should be specific and
illustrate to the user what they will be taken to. ABC Travel's
site will have a full list of offers in the main page, with
each deal linking to the relevant page for that category,
thus making each link specific and unambiguous. Colours should
be used to clearly indicate what links have been visited.
They should also change colour when hovering over a link to
indicate to the user that it is a valid link. Technologies
such as cascading style sheets incorporate such changes effectively.
A problem arose regarding links to external sites. There
are numerous external links to give users information and
advice about their journeys. Being an e-commerce website,
one has to be very cautious not to provide users an opportunity
to go to another company's website. It was therefore decided
that the links would open a new window, still leaving the
customer in ABC Travel's domain, but allowing the customer
to view the external site. This would enable the customer
to find the extra information they desire and then continue
to browse on ABC Travel's website.
The holidays booking engine in particular is hosted at an
external website that is customised for ABC Travel. The most
appropriate solution for the holidays booking engine was to
put the external site in an iframe which would allow the user
to have the full functionality of the external site whilst
remaining in ABC Travel's domain.
Login and Registration: It was decided that the
website will not have a login function because customer registration
forms do not generally attract new customers. After the meeting
with Mr. Y however, it became clear that some form of registration
would be required for the transaction to be processed. The
registration therefore would be delayed until the very last
point before the customer bought a ticket, whereby the customer
would already be willing to buy from ABC Travel.
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