September 24, 2008

We spoke about the 7c’s and viewed and discussed my websites.

Ivillage.com was community based site for women. It had polls, news, message boards, and many other links. It is sponsored and has several ads all over the site. Starmedia.com is portal for Hispanics. The difference between Baruch, Harvard, and Columbia websites were its colors. Some had readable colors such as Columbia, which had white background and dark letters. The worst was Harvard’s websites color, the crimson header was ok, but the golden background and colors weren’t really flowing. Baruch’s site had too much dark colors, dark blue background, and light blue navigation. It is hard to read the body.

The seven design elements of the customer interface:

Context: site’s layout and design
Content: text, pictures, sound and video that the webpages contain
Community: the ways sites enable user-to-user communication
Communication: the ways sites enable site-to-user communication or two-way communication
Customization: site’s ability to self-tailor to different users or to allow users to personalize the site
Connection: degree site is linked to other sites
Commerce: site’s capabilities to enable commercial transactions

The look and feel of a website is determined by it’s Context, Dimensions of Context. Functionally-oriented site focuses largely on the core offering. Product/Service/Info. Aesthetics of the site is focused on the design of the site, color scheme and visual themes.

The dimensions of content are the offering mix which is what the site is offering. Appeal mix refers to the promotional and communication messaging projected by the company. The Multimedia mix refers simply to the mix of media.  Content Type is information presented on a website with a high degree of time.

We are concerned about Community because it provides incentives to individuals to come to the site. Reviews, Forums, chatrooms are community feature.

Levers used to customize a site are Personalization(user) or Tailoring(organization).

Firms can maintain several types of communication with its customer base such as Broadcast, Interactive, and Hybrid.

A firm communicates with other business through creating links on there site, homesite background which shows the other site with the main site in the background, outsourcing content to sites, having a percentage of homesite content, and pathway connections.

The Main features of commerce that support the various aspects of trading transactions are registration, shopping cart, security, cc approval, one-click shopping, orders through affiliates, configuration tech, order tracking, delivery options.