Objectives

This report discusses the analysis and design of the Baby time website. Baby Time is a small upscale shop in Deer Park Mall specializing in clothes, toys and accessories for infants and toddlers. The business is aiming at creating an online presence for its existing customers and for new customers by creating a website. The report presents a discussion of the analysis of the Baby Time Business as done by Blue Fish Media and how this analysis is useful in implementing the design of the proposed website. The report gives justifications for various design patterns that have been used throughout the design of the website.

Baby Time is a small shop dealing with accessories, toys and clothes for toddlers and infants. The business operates in a single outlet. Currently, the business does not have an online presence so customers cannot know about the business through an online website but instead the customers have to visit the shop to know different products and services provided by the business. Considering the current trend of most businesses to create an online presence either by use of a simple website that gives information about the business or an e-commerce website through which customers can purchase goods and pay using different online merchants, there is need for Baby Time to take advantage of what technology has to offer for business. By creating a website the business has the following expectations;

• Creating a website for the business will help the business to reach its existing and new customers easily because relaying of information through a website is easy and cheap using a website. Customers will be able to know what products the business sells and what offers they can get. The customers will also be able to get information about the opening hours of the business.
• By deploying a website, the business can be able to promote the business through online promotion of the business. Doing online campaigns for example in social media websites will help the business to get more customers which will result to more sales. Online campaigns will be done in such a way that users are turned into prospective customers through ads in social media and other websites.
• The website will help the business to get feedback from its customers through the contact form provided. Customers can file complaints to the business and this information will be very useful to the business as it will help the business to determine what things they are doing right so that they can improve them even more and what things they are doing wrong so that they can change them to achieve higher customer satisfaction which is the model of any business.

The target audience of the website is all people with infants and toddlers whether male or female. The website mainly targets families with toddlers or infants who are willing to make their child’s experience a good one. Other people who want to buy gifts for children can also visit the website and see different products that they can buy at the store for children. Because the business does not operate outside of the country, the target audience can be narrowed down to people within the country.

This is not the first website of its type thus there is a possibility that the website will face a few competitions from existing players in the markets. However, due to the model of the business towards customer satisfaction the business will still have a place in the market. However there is need to recognize existing players in the market that might be potential competition to Baby Time. These competitors are;

• myer.com.au
• kmart.com.au
• kidstuff.com.au

To analyse the websites of the two competing players against key website design principles there is need to identify the key web design principles; these principles are;

• Responsiveness- A good website design should be responsive across various range of devices. With the current growth in use of smartphones, a good website should be able to respond and adapt when opened in a desktop or a small screen device like a smartphone. Both devices should be able to give the user the same good experience while ensuring that the user feels like he or she is accessing the same website across the two devices (Chand, 2016).
• Purpose- the design of the website should be able to meets its purpose. When a visitor visits the website hoping to achieve a given goal like for example view or search for specific products, the design implemented for the website should make it possible for the visitor to achieve all these goals. The design should not be so good that it compromises on the functionality of the website (Goel, 2014).
• Navigation- a good design should offer a good avigation menu to help the user to navigate across all the pages to perform various tasks defined within the scope of the website.

Target Audience

Based on these design principles the websites of the key competitive players in the market can be evaluated to find out their strengths and weaknesses.

Although this website sells other types of items for example women clothing, it has a kids section that is good for the analysis. Considering the key design principles, the following questions are asked to know whether the website has followed good website design principles;

• Is the website responsive- the website is responsive because after testing it on three types of devices; desktop, tablet and mobile phone the website was able to respond and adapt across the three devices.
• Does the website meets its purpose- the purpose of the website is to create an online presence for the business thus the website meets its purpose because the website offers the visitors all the products sold by the business and uses a cart feature where customers can add items to their carts to make a purchase.
• Does the website have a good navigation- the website has used a good navigation menu considering the website has a lot of pages. The navigation menu is usable across all devices thus it’s able to respond with the website.

However, there are few flaws I noticed with the website; the website has a lot of content and that makes it to get the structure of the website because of a clutter effect.

This website specializes in selling of kids accessories and clothing thus it’s a direct competition to Baby Time. Based on the key design principles, an evaluation is done to see whether the design of the website is a success. The evaluation is done by asking questions for every key website design principle;

• Is the website responsive- the website is responsive because after testing it on three types of devices; desktop, tablet and mobile phone the website was able to respond and adapt across the three devices.
• Does the website meets its purpose- the purpose of the website is to create an online presence for the business thus the website meets its purpose because the website offers the visitors all the products sold by the business and uses a cart feature where customers can add items to their carts to make a purchase.
• Does the website have a good navigation- the website has used a good navigation menu considering the website has a lot of pages. The navigation menu is usable across all devices thus it’s able to respond with the website.

Although the website is a success, there is one flaw I noticed with the website. As I was accessing the website I realized the website could go down for some time thus becoming inaccessible and since its an e-commerce website should be up 24/7.

This website deals with selling of kids stuff mainly toys and apparels. This website is a direct competitor for the business because the website sells the same items as the Baby Time business and is operating as an e-commerce website thus it’s a direct competitive player in the market. The design of kidstuff website can be tested by asking the following questions;

• Is the website responsive- the website is responsive because after testing it on three types of devices; desktop, tablet and mobile phone the website was able to respond and adapt across the three devices.
• Does the website meets its purpose- the purpose of the website is to create an online presence for the business thus the website meets its purpose because the website offers the visitors all the products sold by the business and uses a cart feature where customers can add items to their carts to make a purchase.
• Does the website have a good navigation- the website has used a good navigation menu considering the website has a lot of pages. The navigation menu is usable across all devices thus it’s able to respond with the website.

Although the website meets all the key principles of a good design for a website, there is one flaw I noticed with the website. The website has a bigger load time as compared to a standard e-commerce website. This could be attributed to the large use of media items like high quality images. This is in turn affecting the load time of the website where by its pages are taking longer to load and every website visitor expects to see all contents of a website using the minimal amount of time so that he or she can proceed to check out other pages. Although the design is highly amplified by the high quality images, this affecting the load time. A good solution to this problem would be to optimize the images using existing algorithms that minimize the size while still maintaining quality of the image. Optimizing this would reduce the load time of the pages of the website while still maintaining the quality and aesthetic look of the website.

From the analysis of the requirements of the website, the specifications of the website were achieved. This section discusses the design of the proposed website and gives justifications for various choices of the design elements. The elements of the design discusses in this section are;

• Color scheme- The color scheme selected for the proposed website is black, orange and white to achieve the desired pallet. The three colors were selected for use for this website because they result to a stunning design when used interchangeably for backgrounds and fonts.
• Page layout- the page layout chosen for the proposed website is ice. A page designed using ice layout doesn’t change the width of the browser but narrows down enough for it to be viewed with the maximum resolution. The reason for using this type of layout is because the website has a lot of contents because thus the arrangement of the content has to be maintained to make it easy for the user to view all contents especially for the category page.
• Font- the selected font used for the website varies from normal text to headings. The selected font family used for the website is Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif. For normal text the size of the text is set to 11px/1.5em which is visible for all visitors. For heading 1 the selected font size is 16px, bold and the color is set to orange which is the theme color of the design. For heading2, the selected font size is 13px and the font weight is bold. The heading are set to bold with a larger font size to make it them stand out on top of normal text (Woods, 2014).

Conclusion

With the implementation of the new website, the business is assured to get an online presence which will in turn boost its sales and revenues in the long run. The proposed website will be assessed by use of existing customers to get therir feedback and reviews and frequent updates and maintenance will be done to make sure that all website visitors get a good experience from the website. 

References

Chand, M., 2016. Top 10 Characteristics Of A Good Website. C#Corner. Available at: https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/top-10-characteristics-of-a-good-website/ [Accessed May 27, 2018].

Goel, R., 2014. Top 10 characteristics and qualities of a Good Website. web info zone. Available at: https://www.webinfozone.com/articles/top-10-characteristics-and-qualities-of-a-good-website-articleListing-1004 [Accessed May 27, 2018].

Woods, S., 2014. 10 Top Principles of Effective Web Design. ShortieDesigns. Available at: https://shortiedesigns.com/2014/03/10-top-principles-effective-web-design/ [Accessed May 27, 2018].