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Further Improvements
A future improvement could be implemented with regards to
the feedback form. The emails could be extracted onto a database,
which could then be used for emailing the customers with promotions
that ABC Travel offer.
Search Engines
One of the criticisms suggested by myself, was that more
generic searches would not retrieve a link to the website.
A future improvement would be to increase the likelihood of
retrieving the website in a generic search.
Security
The current security measure to connect the internal system
to the ISP is to use SSL connection. A more secure way would
be for the ISP to only allow access to the database from ABC's
specific IP address. This would only be feasible however with
a larger organisation.
Meeting the Users' Needs
A usability questionnaire was sent to about sixty potential
customers from within the user categories of students, business
and academics specifically and some generic users. There were
19 questions in total and users were also asked to give three
negative aspects and three positive aspects to the website.
The questionnaire was divided into sections so that it could
be appropriately evaluated. Some statistical analysis from
the questionnaire is displayed in the table below with each
result:
The averages for each section were high, ranging from 5 to
7, suggesting that the users were generally happy with the
website.
How the Website has Changed ABC Travel
This cannot be assessed at the present time as the booking
engines have not been acquired and consequently the website
is not live. The website has however contributed to ABC, as
it is the first stage towards an e-commerce website.
"His involvement with ABC has helped us crystallise
our 'ideas' and significantly reduced our costs in building
a web site that will be a fundamental part of our commercial
future."
Criticisms
There was a lack of communication between Mr X and myself
from the time of implementation until the finished system
was presented to the company, as there was no need for me
to visit ABC at that time.
When the time came to present the project to the company,
he remarked that they were waiting for me to finish the website
before they ordered the booking engine. The embedding of the
booking engine within the website was therefore not achieved
due to the limited time of the project.
Search Engines
One request that was raised was to have the website appear
in the major search engines. If "ABC Travel" is
inputted, the website appears in the first page. However,
if more general queries such as "student offers"
or "business flights" are entered, the website is
not present. As the website was a mere prototype, I wrote
the content with the expectation of it being changed by ABC
and consequently did not dwell on the wording. Furthermore,
many search engines order the hits by 'click rate'. As the
website is not presently live or functional, it would have
a low click rate, which would affect its listing in the search
engine.
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