Kudler Fine Foods E-Commerce Website

Kudler Fine Foods E-Commerce Website Kudler Fine Foods E-Commerce Website * Introduction â€Å"E Commerce is one of the most important facets of the Internet to have emerged in the recent times. Ecommerce or electronic commerce involves carrying out business over the Internet with the assistance of computers, which are linked to each other forming a network. To be specific, ecommerce would be buying and selling of goods and services and transfer of funds through digital communications† (Benefits of Ecommerce†,  2007).With the launch of Kudler Fine Foods new eCommerce solution quickly approaching, this is an exciting time for Kudler and its staff. The benefits of this expansion will not only increase revenue for the company, but afford the opportunity to create new jobs and provide a new range of services to all customers. From the customer’s perspective, everything will start from the Kudler Fine Foods homepage. The home page will maintain the original look and design, but the customer will notice two new additions when visiting. The first addition will be a â€Å"shop† link included in the navigation bar.This will bring the customer into the store’s inventory of items available for online purchase. These new features and services will now be explained, as well as a step by step walk through the customer will experience when making online purchases. Shop When Shop is selected in the navigation toolbar at the top of the website the user opens a new webpage. This webpage is the â€Å"shop† page where the user sees a dropdown box giving them the following categories to choose from: Bakery, Meat and Seafood, Produce, Cheese and Dairy and final Wine.After selecting the category the user will then click on the â€Å"shop† button to the right. They will then be sent that category webpage to make their purchases. Purchase of Items To purchase items the user will see the category webpage where there is a list of all the products offered for this category. Each item will have a description of the product and the price of each item. There is an â€Å"add† button at the end of each item description where the user can choose to purchase this item by â€Å"clicking† on the add button.At the top of each category page the user has the option to go to the other category pages by clicking on the â€Å"go to† button for each category listed on that button. At the bottom of each page there are two buttons to choose; View Cart and Checkout. View Cart View cart allows the user to see all the items that they have chosen to purchase. A list of each item with their price will be shown. At the end of each item row there is a â€Å"remove† button where the user can remove the item from the list. This is the only location the user can remove their items they have chosen to purchase.At the bottom of this page there are buttons to choose to go to the other category pages or to checkout page. If the user chooses to go to another category and selects and item from that page, it will be added to the view cart page. Even if the user goes all the way back to the â€Å"home† page they can start looking at other categories and each item will be added to the shopping cart where it can be seen on the view cart page. After the user has made all their choices to purchase, they can click on the â€Å"checkout† button at the bottom of the page to finalize their purchase.Checkout The checkout page is the final page the customer will need to go to in order to finish their purchase. Here the customer can see all of the items they have selected along with the total of the purchase they are about to make. It they want to remove an item they will need to go back to â€Å"view cart† where they can remove the item. Under the list and total of the items to be purchased, there is a form to fill out. This form is the Payment Information form needed to finish the purchase. Here the customer will input their Name, Address, Town/City, State and Zip code.Then they will select from the dropdown box which credit card they plan to use to make the purchase. After selecting the credit card, there is a box for the credit card number to be entered. After the customer enters in their credit card number, they can either choose the â€Å"submit† to finish the purchase or choose the â€Å"reset† button to clear out the form. If they choose to reset the form, the information will be deleted and they may begin a new ordering process. Marketing our website/promote website Marketing in e-commerce is just as important as the site itself.That brings us to how we can add code into our site to help make us more visible to search engines; meta data is what is used to make us visible to our customers. â€Å"Meta data is, quite simply, data about data. Your document is nothing but a piece of data for a search engine, and meta data helps describes and categoriz es it. Webmasters place meta data inside their HTML documents, to help improve their ranking on search engines, and to help end-users locate their site† (â€Å"Marketing Your Website : Meta Data†,  1999).We will put a description meta tag and keyword metadata tag on each of the webpages we have made for the shopping feature. This way each category will be part of the web search when a customer is looking for one of our products. The metadata tags we are going to use will be the â€Å"description†, â€Å"keyword† (these will be on all webpages); â€Å"author†, â€Å"content-type†, â€Å"refresh† and â€Å"revised† tags (only one the shop page). The description tag lets you put the title of the page when the keyword tag is where you can put important keywords to be found when search engine can find it easier.The author tag shows all that look at our website who created it. The content-type tag shows what we used such as text, ht ml and the UTF8. The refresh one allows the page to refresh at the time limit we set for each page. Then revised will show who ever has to update or modify the shopping pages will know when they were last done making it easier to keep up with the alterations. SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing a website so it will position well in search engines results. â€Å"This means designing your web pages so the search engines will find the right keywords in your web page content.Optimization is all about making sure the search engines will find information that will increase the chance of your page being included in search results†(â€Å"How to promote a website as part of the website design†, n. d. ). some ways to help in this area to make the site more visible include but not limited to include the main keywords in the website title, more keywords in the website description, keywords in the sidebar links, keywords in the content text, be sure all pa ges are reachable, and pages should be easy to navigate. A website can be submitted to search engines so they will know about it.This used to be a necessary step to notify search engines about new websites. Now search engines constantly monitor the Internet for new web pages (and changed web pages) so they will discover your website. â€Å"To ensure that your fresh content or site improvements don't languish un-indexed, submit to Google an XML sitemap, which shows your site's coding, each time you do an update. Google will help you correct any errors in the sitemap to make its indexing more accurate, and will crawl your site more often if you routinely send it XML sitemap updates. † (McElgunn, J. )It is still a good idea to submit your website to all four major search engines (AOL, Google, MSN, and Yahoo) because these four primarily are the ones used for most Internet searches. Another way to increase the SEO for Kudler Fine Foods is with a Facebook page since they are used to get consumers from a social media. Creating a Facebook page for Kudler Fine Foods and getting the consumer to click on â€Å"like† on the page will boost the way the SEO ranks there website. Facebook is another way to notify customers of deals being offered so they will want to check them out on their website.More consumers viewing their website will move them to the top faster. We will add the Facebook logo to the top of each page so the customer can access it from the website. Publish/upload website Once the website has been created, the testing is complete, and the site is ready to go live we need to upload the files to our web server so our customers can start accessing and using the site. One easy option we can use is a program called FileZilla which uses an FTP (file transfer protocol) or we can use a web design product from the host that can upload all the files easily.With the FTP option we have to manually upload each file we want to use. If using a web design pro duct it will upload everything you have at one time. â€Å"Be sure to thoroughly test the website after the upload to be sure all necessary files were successfully uploaded and work correctly. When you need to update a web page you can just upload that page (and related files) and the upload will overwrite the old files. NOTE – Some web design software products save web pages in their own unique file format and automatically convert the files to web format files (e. . HTML) when the upload/publish function is used. If you are going to use FTP software for your uploads, you will first need to do a save-as/export for the web page files to create HTML files. It is a good idea to save these files in a separate folder to make the FTP file selection easier as the web design unique format files do not need to be uploaded. Also, if you use FTP software for your uploads you must also upload files and graphics used by the webpage† (â€Å"How To Publish/upload Web Pages†,à ‚  n. d. )†. Resource: Benefits of ecommerce. 2007). Retrieved from http://www. ecommerceprogram. com/ecommerce/benefits-of-ecommerce. asp How to publish/upload web pages. (n. d. ). Retrieved from http://www. doawebsite. com/publish. html How to promote a website as part of the website design. (n. d. ). Retrieved from http://www. doawebsite. com/promote. html Marketing your website : Meta Data. (1999). Retrieved from http://www. davidreilly. com/topics/electronic_commerce/web_marketing/meta-data. html McElgunn, J. Google Grabbers. Profit, Mar2008, Vol. 27 Issue1, p56-57, 2p.