Answer:

Introduction

This report presents a discussion on the making of the house of cards website. It discusses the process whole process of developing the website from the initial planning stage up to when the final design. The planning stage discusses the overview of the website by showing the target audience and the expected content and how it will be designed to create a good website.

Website title

House of Cards

Website developer

Student ID: 12044290

Name: Maruf Bhayala

Focus

House of cards is interested with creating an online presence and the best way to do so is by designing and creating a website that can be accessed by visitors that are interested in getting information about the business. The website will not an e-commerce website but will be a simple website containing crucial information about the business which will be helpful to interested customers. Customers who access the website can expect to find the following information;

• When a visitor opens the website, the customer should land on the home page which has a welcome message and the floor plan of the store.
• Visitors will also find all types of postcards, greeting cards and playing cards sold by the store. All items will be shown using pictures and the visitor can open an item to view detailed information about the item.
• Opening hours of the business.

Site plan

The site plan of the website will show the basic layout of the website and different elements that will be used in different pages of the website.

Main elements.

The design of the website has the following elements for every page that makes the website;

• Header- The header element of the design is the top most section of every page making up the website. The header consists of the logo of the business and the navigation menu which is used to navigate through the various pages making up the website.
• Body or content section- The content section is where details about the page appear. For example the home page, the content section has a welcome message and the floor plan while the content section of the opening hours has details of the opening hours.
• Footer section- The footer section is the bottom most section the website and has the copyright information and the name of the designer of the website. 

Content

The content making up the website can be divided up into pages that make up the website. These pages are;

• Home page- this is the landing page of the website and has a welcome message and the floor plan of the store.
• Greeting cards page- this page has all the products of the types of greeting cards sold by the store. Each greeting card is a link which is supposed to take the user to a page with detailed information about the card
• Playing cards page- this page has information about all the types of cards sold by the store. Each playing card is a link that takes the user to a page with the detailed information about the card
• Post cards page- this page has information about all the types of post cards sold by the store. Each postcard is a link to a page that has detailed information about the post card.
• Business hours page- this page has information about the business hours that the store operates on.

Target audience

The house of cards website targets all customers or prospective customers who are interested with any of the product that is sold by the store. The website will act as an online guide for the customers to find information about different products sold by the store.

Design considerations

Design considerations are the factors that will be considered while designing the website.

1Mision statement

The final design should achieve a good aesthetic design that is appealing to all visitors whether new or existing visitors. The design should strike a balance between the looks and the functionalities thus while achieving a good design, the website should be to use for all visitors.

User stories

From the requirements document, the following user stories are derived for a visitor of the website.

As a visitor;

• I should land on the home page which should have a floor plan that should guide to the various section making up the store.
• I should be able to see all products sold by the store based on their classification. Every item should have a page with the detailed information about the product.
• I should be able to see the opening hours

Design

Using the user stories in section 2.4.2 above a design of the website can be modelled using an interaction diagram and a wireframes.

The following diagram is used to show user interactions when the user visits the website.

Figure 1: Interaction diagram

Using the user stories and the user interaction diagram above, wireframes of the website can be drawn to show the structure of the website. The following are the wireframes for every page.

Implementation

After designing the wireframes, the implementation was done using HTML5 and CSS3 to achieve the following design for every page

Design considerations

To achieve a good design, the following design considerations were reviewed and followed.

• The combination of colors is supposed to make the website appealing while allowing all content of the website to be seen (Quilin, 2005).
• The typeface used for writing the content should be visible to make it easy for a user to read the content of each page.
• The website should have a good navigation menu to make sure that the user can navigate to any page of the website easily.
• The elements of every page should be arranged and stacked in order to improve the overall of every page.

Measuring success

To measure the success of design of the website, two methods can be applied;

• The first method to measure the success of the website is to compare the design with the user stories to make sure that all user requirements are covered within the design.
• The second method is doing a survey by getting a number of visitors and asking them to visit and use the website and then administering a questionnaire to determine their feedback and then analyzing the feedback to determine the success of the website.

Limiting factors

Although the design of the website achieved all user requirements, there are few limiting factors that were encountered;

• The design of the website was only supposed to use HTML5 and CSS3 which was a limiting factor as there are many libraries like Bootstrap that can be used to make the design of the website even better compared to the current design (Sreejith, 2009). This would have also been easy to design.
• The website does not have any storage measures as it is purely statistic. The products have to be incorporated into the design using HTML while this can be done better using a server side database or client side data structure.

Conclusion

The process of designing the house of cards website involved many steps from planning of the website to the implementation to achieve the end design. The end design was able to meet all user requirements. 

References

Quillin, M. J. (2001, November 25). Object Oriented Analysis and Design. Retrieved April 20, 2018, from https://www.umsl.edu/~sauterv/analysis/488_f01_papers/quillin.htm

Sreejith. (2009, July 27). FEASIBILITY STUDY – SOFTWARE ENGINEERING. Retrieved April 20, 2018, from https://softwarefeasibilitystudy.blogspot.co.ke/2009/07/feasibility-study-software-engineering.html