Summary Guide For a Small Retailer In The Creation of a Website and Management Issue Involved

In creating a website for small retailer, there are many steps to do and some of that are vital. The company who want to expand their business, website is a way to go global, but not as easy as thought, creating a website also giving some extra complex tasks but able to be easy if the company know how to do in creating a website.

"Underground Grosir" is a company which working in supply and accepting orders from customer or even another company to provide t-shirt, shirt, t-shirt badge, pin, and mug with unique design or user-preference design. They are located at Bandung and they have huge desire to make their brand become known by many customers around Indonesia. Currently, their customers commonly come from Bandung, Jakarta, and small city in West Java. The owner want to have a website that introduce their company profile, products and also handling online order from potential customers. To build their website, they have to know what to do and also they have to manage the creation or the step carefully in order to maximize their website.

Steps for creating a website

1. Establish Selection Product's Category and Customer / Target Audience
   The company have to define or initiate their product's category and their target audience, so that, they will have good references in finding prescribed menu for their site also the theme of the website.
   In this step, the company also define their goal with this website, by doing that, the company will have a feeling to tight firmly and willing to put good effort in building their website


2. Create the Website's Graphic Design
   After deciding what type of product's category, target audience, and the goal of the website, the owner now consider with the design of the website. The graphic design are commonly like the layout of a website, graphics or pictures to be used, establish hyperlinks, text-formatting and etc. according to the retailer's needs and desires. To make the design more interactive, "Underground Grosir"can use some flash media or scripts.


3. Build (or Rebuild) the website
   
   1. Buy our domain name and sign up for a hosting service.
      This is the first step of developing any type of commercial website. Buying domain name and hosting a website can be done in two way whether we like to manage the server by our own (this type of choice is expensive) or to buy a domain that managed by third party. Usually the companies that offer domain registration will also offer hosting services. The name of the website should be easy to remember and attractive. For example: www.undergoundgrosir.com, www.undergorund-shirt.com, or www.bandung-undergound.com.
   
   
   2. Select website design software for our retail website.
      "Underground Grosir" can use templates for their website design and there are many choices out there, such as Template Monster, Free Website Template, or Arcsin. Then, after searching the template, we can buy shopping cart program or if necessary, we can build it by ourself.
   
   
   3. Pull together a price list and a product description list that include all the items our plan on carrying on your retail website.
      The description of the product must be easy to understand and delivered. Use both of these lists when setting up retail website. For each item we want to host on our retail website you will need a clear color digital image. For more advanced websites we will want to include multiple photographs of each item, with special shots taken of important product details.
   
   
   4. Use our website design software to create the basic layout of your new retail website.
      We will need to use the import image option to upload your product graphics to our website. Then use the text editing tools to name the products, assign them a product number and to enter a product description. Also, we have to make sure that we assign each product a price.
   
   
   5. Upload our shopping cart program to your hosting service.
      After uploading the shopping cart to our hosting service, we need to consider how customer will pay for the products they bought. "Undergound Grosir" and their customers will use bank to do a transaction and it need confirmation from the customer via sms, email, or telephone.
   
   
   6. Manage our retail website.
      To keep our retail website functional, we will need to monitor orders, keep the inventory data up-to-date and you will need to add and modify text, graphics and supplemental information posted on our website periodically.


4. Consider the Security
   Managing website not only to keep it uptodate, but also to keep away our website from internet-attack, such as viruses, hacking, phising, or DoS. Security seems to be important today in e-commerce business, because many e-commerce site use credit-card to do transaction and it is crucial if security is not applied to our website. Also, viruses in our server can make the accessing into our website becoming so slow that can make our visitors reluctant to access it again. So, there are many ways to do such as personalized people who can access private data and perform security-check regularly


5. Testing and Launch the Website
   Testing our website before launch, check the link text or button, graphics, or other element in our website. After checking the website and there are almost no error, we can launch the website. By doing this, our customer will enjoy our site because they comfort with the convenience we offered to them.


6. Website Maintenance
   Managing a website is not too hard but also not too easy. The maintenance including control our website and communication with customer, update information and news, checking error and security issues, always do some improvements in our website if possible (in speed of access, design of our website, or even the easeness of our activity flow such as purchase or buying a products). Customer Relationship Management (CRM) also depend on how good we manage and maintenance our website.

MANAGEMENT ISSUE IN BUILDING A WEBSITE

Defining the purposes of your website is vital to avoid 'mission creep' and thus keep costs under control. But there are management issues to be considered and to be treated well, There are:

Budgeting

It includes: Planning (setting out requirements and perhaps a specification), Design or 'visuals' (sample pages to show the style, maybe leading to changes in livery for web use), implementation (including databases, associated support software, integration with existing systems), Testing (both functional and cross-platform compatibility eg PC, Mac, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Safari), Launch (deployment of component parts, website configuration, marketing, search engine registration), Operational costs (hosting, marketing, CRM, secure certificate), Website content management (in-house, out-of-house)

Frequently thought is only given to the design element, but most serious websites also require databases and perhaps integration with an existing sales order processing system. However there are minimum costs below which you cannot expect a reasonable result. As ever, it's a balance. The importan point is whether the cost that we expend is appropriate with return on investment (ROI) we will get.

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Design issues

Website design has a lot of constraints - notably the shape, size, resolution and color capabilities of the viewing system. Font options are also severely limited at the present time. The accurate placement of design elements that print media allow is not available on web pages, so there are a series of compromises to be made. The following list indicates most of the major design considerations:

• Target market - what viewing facilities are they likely to have?
• Base layout - is there an existing corporate livery to follow?
• Content - how often does it change? How will it be managed? Is it date dependent?
• Databases - do you have corporate data or reports that need to be presented?
• Multimedia - is it appropriate?
• Accessibility - what's appropriate to your market and your legal obligations
• Interactivity - this frequently requires database support to remember visitor details
• Search/drill down facilities
• Multiple languages - French, German, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian, Arabic, Russian, Japanese
• Locales supported (eg British, US, Australian or other)
• Scope
• Security - particularly for commerce
• Visitor experience - speed, ease of navigation
• Newsletters - collecting addresses
• Forums - creating a community and a reason to revisit

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Commerce

There are specific issues with commerce that can cause problems. Apart from selling something downloadable like software or reports (which are infinitely available) any other system has to take account of stock either in-house or from a wholesaler. Some of the issues are:

• Shopping systems - product management, price list management, baskets, special offers, affiliate schemes
• Payment handling - credit card, cheque, credit transfer, wire transfer, manual or automatic
• Credit card transactions - merchant ID, AVS (address verification system)
• Secure certificates
• Drop shipping - shipping directly from a wholesaler
• Integration with your existing sales order processing system
• Serial number management (software sales only)
• VAT processing - place of supply, place of delivery considerations, EU issues
• Terms and conditions, copyright, privacy policy and securing 'personal information

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Legal

Legislation is starting to catch up with Internet trading and so this is a moving target. At present there are three main sets of legislation that affect websites:

• Disability Discrimination
• Distance Selling Regulations
• Data Protection

The terms and conditions of trade should also be specific about the jurisdiction in force eg England & Wales or Scotland.

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Marketing and promotion
are very difficult to promote because of the wide use of both the words ceramic and tile; a website selling Bewick engravings is going to be much easier to promote, not least because there's a proper noun in there.
Some important considerations are:

• Getting useful traffic to your website - as opposed to inappropriate leads that waste your resources
• Keywords/meta tags - important for some search engines but not the principal one: Google
• Offline promotion - frequently more important than online promotion
• Company livery should incorporate the website and email addresses - unbelievably frequently omitted

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Operational issues

Once the website is up and running there will be costs involved in promoting and maintaining it. Out-of-date websites are a turn-off for visitors and are therefore counterproductive.
Keeping the content of your website fresh may turn into something akin to magazine production where there is a need for continuous input. This requires the content management to be someone's responsibility on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis as appropriate. In other cases it may just be a question of keeping course data or an events list up-to-date.

MAIN ISSUE	DETAIL
Which Type of e-business applications we develop?	Online ordering and CRM. Customers including B2B and B2C where customer will get every latest update about the products and promo. "Undergound Grosir" are also handling events such as Employee Gathering or something like that. And the unique product always updated every weeks with new product in the future.
Which Technologies do we use?	Online ordering or web-based ordering and also company profile, because "Underground Grosir" want to reach wide customers.
How do we achieve quality of service in application?	"Underground Grosir" will adding this feature to their website: Detail Information. Categories is Defined Clearly. Security Maintenance. Picture Thumbnail for father speed and performance. Compatibility with Browsers or Cross Browser (ex: IE, Firefox, Safari). Using CMS (Content Management System) to Maintain Website. Using Customer Tracking Method to Maximize CRM.
Where do we host applications?	Extranet. We do not have to having server to host our application, but we buy service from other party. This website also dedicated to the customer and not build for internal community.
Application Integration	Integration of e-business solutions with: Legacy systems. Old system will be applied first such as order procedures, contact procedure. Partner systems. In the future, "Underground Grosir" have plan to have a affiliate in other city. Also, they want to connect with their supplier to handle material ordering. In long term plan, they want to extend their facilities in payment using credit card. B2B and B2C.
Which access platforms do we support? Which development technologies and standards do we use?	Windows, Unix. Using personal CMS such as Wordpress or Joomla (especially for shopping cart / e-commerce). To give end-user or customers something more that other website, we plan to added flash video or synchronized the web site with javascript and XML to maximize the speed..
How do we manage content and data	Always do update of the website by administration website (using tools personal CMS). Content and data will be managed regularly according to the specification. And they will appoint two or more resources to respons the customer who contact them via website.
How do we manage employee access to the internet?	Only limited people who are available to have the access to the website, such as: Web Administrator. Owner. These people have the ability to access the private data (update, insert, and delete information).
How do we secure data?	Encryption method and regularly, check website and fix the problem issues. Error log and mallicious activities log.

Source:

• http://www.caz.ltd.uk/bd/wi.asp
• http://www.ehow.com/how_4529681_creating-new-retail-website.html
• http://www.fno.org/jun96/legal.html
• http://www.riedel.com/
• http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7386490.htm/