Question: For your assignment work in this course you will develop one web application with a shopping cart for a small retail business, which may either be a pharmacy, a clothing store, a hardware store, a book store, or a music store.
For the first submission you are required to provide the following in a word document, using the bullet point as headings:
1. The retail business
2. Competitors existing functionality
3. List of essential functionality
4. List of copyright free images
5. Evidence of starting web application in Visual Studio
6. XML file
Except for the XML file, you will need to place the information required into a word document. Please see the corresponding heading below for details.
1. The retail business
Select a retail business of your choice from the above list. Consider that the products of your retail business can be grouped. For example, books usually are grouped into genre, such as "Cooking", "Sports", or "Programming", while clothes may be grouped into "Shirts", "Dresses", "Jackets". In this course this grouping is referred to as category. For this assignment, it is assumed that your retail business would currently have a brick-and-mortar business, in other words, it would have a physical shop and be storing the products in their location. They would be a family business that has been successful for some years and be now in a position to sell their products online. They contracted you to write the web application for them.
Provide the name you gave your retail business, a short description of the specific products and categories of your products.
- Do not cater for the following
Your are specifically asked, NOT to cater for the following:
- Do NOT cater for Search functionality
- Do NOT cater for About page
- Do NOT cater for Contact us page
- Do NOT cater for Creation of customer account
- Do NOT cater for Login requirements
- Do NOT cater for Blog or other Social Media
- Do NOT cater for Any other functionality that is not essential for the web application to work.
2. Competitors existing functionality
You are required to research two web sites of the same type of retails business. This is the competition for your retail business. Provide the following:
- Provide the URL of each web site
- Describe the process of selecting a category and then browsing the products.
- Describe the details of each product available, and if there is link for more information for an individual product.
- While you have the freedom of choice to select these web sites of your preference, the following restrictions apply:
- Do not use eBay, Amazon, or similar types of businesses as they are not functioning in the way required for this course. They have a different business model.
- Do not use web sites where you can only shop or look at products after you have registered. This is not required for this course and the very reason that this functionality is not included in your assignment.
- Do not purchase any items on line. You are not required to purchase items for the purpose of this assignment and while you are reviewing the web sites.
- Do not divulge your details for the purpose of this assignment - this is not required.
3. List of essential functionality
Considering your retails business, which web pages will your web application be catering for? What kind of functionality will these web pages provide. Read through the rest of this first submission assignment specification. The customer must be able to select a category that will then show all products within the category, and from there be able to look at the full details of one individual product. Keep in mind that we do not duplicate web forms for the purpose of different displays.
Using a table in your word document provide a list of web forms (pages) that you are planning to use. One column will be the name of the web form, and the other column description of the functionality of this web form.
4. List of copyright free images
As an IT professional it is essential to ensure that you are ethically correct in what you do, and part of that is knowing what copyright means. Any images you are going to use in your web application MUST be copyright free. You must inform yourself about copyright of images in Australia, and you need to find the web sites that provide explicitly free copyright images. Do not use images that still require a licence or where web sites still require you to obtain their permission. Once you are working in the real world, you need to do the right thing, and the person who will employ you may not know what that is. It is up to you to uphold the IT professional ethics. In other words, just because it is available on the internet, it does not mean that we can use it.
- When you are using these images in your web site you must ensure that they are referenced correctly.
- Once you have decided which retail business you will represent, you will need to provide a logo with the address details, but most importantly you will use images to visually represent the products of the retails business.
- For this assignment you need to provide the following:
- the image you are going to use (copy them into the word document)
- the name of the image and the URL of the web site where you found the images (we will be checking this)
- the images must be decent, non-provocative, and non-offensive
- Here are some resources to guide you:
- The library website has a copyright page here:
- A more comprehensive list, along with attribution guidelines can be found here: Copyright for Students
5. Evidence of starting web application in Visual Studio
For this part of the assignment you need to provide evidence, in other word screen captures, of you having started you web application in Visual Studio, and most of all, in accordance with the course conventions. Please see the extensive instructions on how to create a new web application in the course Moodle books, Module 1, sub-chapter "Software requirements" and "How to start your web application".
- It is important that you show the linking of you web application with IIS by providing screen captures.
- You need to name your web application using your surname and student number only.
- Do not use anything else in the name for your web application.
- Take a screen capture of your solution explorer, which will show the web forms that you added to the web application.
- Name your start page Home.aspx.
Add all the web forms that your list of essential functionality into the web application (what you proposed in the table)
6. XML file
For your type of retail business set up an XML file in Visual Studio, and create the details for the product in accordance of the course material covered and weekly exercise. Load the XML file in the browser and provide a screen capture in your word document.
- Cater for three (3) categories and three (3) products within each category.
- Place XML file in zip folder as a separate file - do not place the XML file in the document.
- Issues and Anomalies
- In the word document, under the heading "Issues and Anomalies" provide details of bugs, where you think the bug might be and could be resolved, incomplete functionality and how this could be implemented.
- What to submit
- Place the word document and the XML file into a Zip folder.
- Use only your student number as the name for the zip folder
- Do not use any other compression than .zip