Briefing Document On Completion Of The Development Of The G.Tube Prototype

Prepare and submit a briefing document with appropriate numbering, headings and sub-headings on completion of the development of the prototype. Include the following in your briefing document:

1. Identify the URL of the website and your assigned business model/category in the first part of the report.
2. Describe the website structure and the purpose of each element (include snapshots and diagrams where appropriate).
3. List the WordPress components and features you used in the development of the prototype.
4. Describe each of the website features and functionality that you implemented in Task 2.
5. Explain any changes you have implemented (or plan to implement) that deviates from your initial proposal and presentation from Assignment 1.
6. List and briefly describe any links and resources that you have used, as well as any that you are likely to use in the building of the fully functional website.

URL and Structure

The website being developed in this case is named G.Tube. It is an e-commerce based website. It is being developed on WordPress platform by making use of the latest version. The version being 4.9. G.Tube is aimed primarily at being an online retailer that specializes in delivering digital products. These products range from things such as E-Books, Movies, Podcasts, Music among more. The products are of digital in nature and does not have any physical counterparts. The website is an alternative version of popular online retailers such as Amazon, iTunes, Playster among others. However, unlike them, the product catalogue are entirely digital. The users can browse through the entire site, make searches if they wish to for the product they want to find and then proceed to purchase the product. Similar to many other online retailers, users are able to make Card payments as well as check payments (SIMS, 2018). It will support majority of the cards being circulated worldwide. This is an important criteria because the website is a digital one and since there is on physical product being shipped, the digital product may be delivered to customer irrespective of their region and location(Fernandes and Vidyasagar, 2015). Also, the website currently offers products in three different categories namely Music, Ebooks and Movies. However, in the future, this shall be expanded to include many other categories essentially covering the digital goods within the ecommerce spectrum . The website is being developed on Wordpress platform as it’s among the most popular and also among the easiet platform for developing websites (Cabot, 2018).

The website is hosted on the Cloudaccess service. As a result, there wasn’t any need of configuring a hosting server and then booking a Domain name, configuring it’s DNS and then hosting it on the respective server. By making use of CloudAccess, the entire service becomes plain and simple with one-click. The URL is located at https://usq1106620.cloudaccess.host/ and the assigned business category is of an E-commerce outlet delivering digital goods. The website has a flat-tree styled structure starting with Homepage at the highest level and ending with either a standard page such as ‘About page’ or a custom page of checkout or forum at the lowest level.

The website is composed of several different pages and elements to make it as close to a functioning real-world ecommerce website as possible. The website has a simple and clean layout. This layout is quite common throughout the internet landscape. The layout includes a Header area, a body area and the footer area. The body area is composed of two sub-sections. These sections includes the main body and the sidebar. The sidebar is activated only in certain areas of the website though.

Website Features and Elements

Homepage Header area

This part of the website contains several key elements of the website. This includes the Logo, the menu bar or the navigational bar, the search button, the header image and the main categories of the website. In future, as these categories grow, it may be replaced by ‘featured categories’ of the website. This section also features a shopping cart icon which displays all of the product a user has in his or her cart. This region of the website serves an important part and majority of users landing on the website would be seeing this page. The logo doubles up as a button to return back to the homepage, the search result searches through the products as well as through the other pages of the site and the menu bar as well as categories are used to navigate to different areas of the website.

This Homepage body area of the website features some of the products being sold on the site in a horizontal columnar fashion. The products being shown here have some meta information as well such as the title of the product, its price, the sale value and an add to cart button for convenient checkout. Apart from that, the products also have an attractive thumbnail being displayed.

Homepage-Footer area

The footer area remains consistent across all of the website. The footer displays important information such as contact number, the copyright date, email among other things. It may also be used to display other important things such as terms and condition, policies etc.

This is the ‘About page’ of the website and contains information about the background, history and overview about the company.

Product Category Page

This is the product category page. This displays all the products within a category. The products can be furthered filtered using the popularity and recency order. Furthermore, the page also allows for filteration of the product by making use of a Pricing ‘slider’ on the right sidebar of the page. Apart from that, the sidebar also displays some important inforamtion for the user.

Login and Registeration Page

This is the Login / Registeration page of the website. A user can either login from this page or even register a new account from this page. Furthermore, they can make use of the lost password facility to retrieve a forgotten password.

This page allows a user to view all the products in his or her shopping cart. From here on, the user can also continue to browse for further products or proceed to the payment of the product. Additionally, the user is also shown relevant and / or related products to the chosen product. Also, if the user possesses a coupon card, they can apply here for a reduction in total price of the product.

WordPress Components and Features Used

Forum

The forum or the discussion board allows a user to engage in discussions with the staff or fellow users of the site. The user can make use of the same profile to continue discussions here and can reply to existing topic or create a new one.

WordPress Themes

I made use of the WordPress theme feature to find the appropriate theme for my website. Being an advanced and popular CMS platforms, there was already a huge repository of themes at my disposal to chose from which did not required designing it from scratch (Majure, 2013).

Furthermore, I made use of the WordPress extensive plugin marketplace to install some plugins that would allow me to create the Website I was looking for. Some of the plugins I used were WooCommerce for e-commerce integration (Rauland, 2016), WPForum for the discussion forum, Akismet for spam control and so on.

WordPress Editor

The built-in editor helped a great deal in my work and instead of coding the images, graphics and texts I wanted to add in HTML, I was simply able to do it in the WYSIWYG styled editor

The WordPress theme customizer was also a great option to cusomize the look and feel of the website to my liking (Rauland, 2016).

The WordPress media manager allowed me to load, edit and embed the multimedia elements on the website.

The WordPress menu and page manager helped me create different pages as well as helped me design the navigational menus on the website (Sabin-Wilson and Mullenweg, 2018).

WordPress provides an additional simple element of embedding widgets on the site which brings in a host of different functionality to the website such as adding a search button on the sidebar or a calendar into the footer or even an archived list of pages to the sidebar.

I made use of several resources for making use of the site. The first and foremost resource was the default documentation for the WordPress. Next, I made use of different books including Wordpress by Wiley & Sons, WordPress for Dummies, Customizing Woocommerce themes by Lynda.com and several instructional YouTube videos as well.

References

Cabot, J. (2018). WordPress: A Content Management System to Democratize Publishing. IEEE Software, 35(3), pp.89-92.

Fernandes, S. and Vidyasagar, A. (2015). Digital Marketing and WordPress. Indian Journal of Science and Technology, 8(S4), p.61.

Lee, H. (2016). Web Design Methodology for WordPress Site based on WordPress Theme Customization. The Journal of the Korea Contents Association, 16(2), pp.277-286.

Majure, J. (2013). WordPress. Indianapolis, IN: J. Wiley & Sons.

Rauland, P. (2016). WordPress Ecommerce: WooCommerce. [Carpinteria, Calif.]: Lynda.com.

Rauland, P. (2016). WordPress: Customizing WooCommerce Themes. [Carpinteria, Calif.]: Lynda.com.

Sabin-Wilson, L. and Mullenweg, M. (2018). WordPress For Dummies. Somerset: John Wiley & Sons.

SIMS, L. (2018). Building Your Online Store With Wordpress And Woocommerce. [S.l.]: APRESS.