CIS323: E-Commerce

Coursework #1

Student #060339366
Kirt Lee Baptiste
Company Overview

Brips Consultancy provides unparalleled website and online software consulting services. Brips
Consultancy represents the aspirations of the most talented individuals in web consulting,
website design and website development in the United Kingdom. We are passionate about
leveraging the power of the web to move your business forward. 

Internet usage has increased tremendously over the past decade, and the web has become an
ever important marketplace as both individuals and corporations increasingly recognize and
exploit the potential of taking their businesses online. Today, the web has emerged as an integral
hub in social, commercial and financial networks. Brips Consultancy is here to empower your
firm to harness the potential of the internet and experience exponential growth! 

Project Overview
The Daily Enquirer is a British daily newspaper with a 150 year-old history. It is well respected
by all within the industry and its writers are considered some of the best in the business.

The managing editor of The Daily Enquirer is Tom Malcolm; a man of few words but great
ideas, he is a great believer in moving with the times. Mr. Malcolm has been investigating the
possibility for The Daily Enquirer to publish some or all of its content online and thus has
looked to us (Brips Consultancy) to design and deliver a proposal for the online version of its
paper-based newspaper.
At present The Daily Enquirer covers all aspects of the news: art, current affairs, sport, politics,
education, holidays, entertainment and lifestyle. It has traditional reporters who write articles
and sometimes record audio interviewers. On rare occasions they use video recording. The
Daily Enquirer also has a large archive of photographs, and articles covering its 150-year
history.
Mr. Malcolm is adamant that the new online version of The Daily Enquirer shouldn’t take too
many readers away from the printed version, which attracts a great deal of its advertising
revenue based upon readers.
Mr. Malcolm expressed his desire for the new website to be self-supporting by it generating its
own revenue, the revenue models which enable this too occur would be explained later on. Also
The Daily Enquirer is looking into the possibility of moving into a smaller building and relying
more on freelance writers who work outside of The Daily Enquirer’s office, thus, an addition to
the current proposal would be a system for freelancers to submit work remotely.
Introduction
Electronic, online newspapers started appearing at about the same time that the Internet
became public. An electronic newspaper has many forms. One form is electronic edition of the
printed newspaper (namely, the publisher publishes its "standard" newspaper on a Website,
using e.g. PDF files) which the “new website” would be offering as an e-Paper. The user can
read the electronic edition similar to a paper edition; there is no personalization, neither with
respect to content nor with respect to layout. Another form of electronic newspaper is news
website, which enables the user browsing in menus that are organized in subject categories and
sub-categories. This is the version Brips Consultancy was contracted to design and hopefully
develop. Yet, another form of electronic newspaper can be seen more like a search engine, which
enables the user to insert search terms (i.e., topics of interest) and get in response respective
news items that are published on the Web by various news providers.
The World Wide Web has become a powerful means of disseminating information to an
audience of unprecedented size. Numerous information gathering and classifying robots or
‘info-bots’ are at work, dedicated to the task of bringing the right information to interested
people. Not surprisingly, various newspapers and publishing houses have started to look upon
the web as a viable publishing medium, and have started placing some of their material on-line
in a hypertext format. The site1 lists several hundreds of articles worldwide. Once the
infrastructure for electronic commerce is in place both the supply and demand for organized
information can be expected to grow.
On-line newspapers are arguably harder on the eyes and ergonomically less appealing than their
hard-copy counterparts. Some studies seem to indicate that raster displays of text compare
favorably with printed text in reading tasks. However, on-line publications do have some
advantages. They are well suited for dynamic news streams that evolve over time, and for the
presentation of multimedia information. Electronic text affords browsing, querying and flexible
reuse. Also, since the structure of electronic newspapers can be easily changed, it is possible to
dynamically personalize the layout and composition of the newspaper. This can be done
interactively by the end-user, and also by the system, based on a prediction of user’s interests.
There are many advantages to placing a newspaper on the web: universal access, the presence of
info-bots which direct users to the service, and a commonly available presentation
infrastructure.
The proposal will demonstrate the design and organization of the news sources, client/server
architecture, and user interfaces leading to The Daily Enquirer paper-based newspaper
transforming into an electronic news delivery system. Initially based on a newspaper metaphor,
the system will exploit communication and multimedia technologies to integrate other news
sources, such as newscasts and video clips, with the text backbone. The system will provide
selective content delivery based on individual and group profiles, hypertext links into archival
and external data, continuous coverage of news stories, interactive objects, and "smart"
advertising.
An initial prototype website has been developed using data that include video clips and news
and photos from the newspaper, The Daily Enquirer. An abstract data representation was
developed for the integration of layout, syntactic, and semantic information from a variety of
sources for the dynamic presentation and manipulation of the news items. This prototype allows
us to explore the potential of the medium for supporting user interfaces that cope with a
potentially large number of news items in a very restricted screen space and the potential for
innovative advertising unlike any advertising we currently experience.

1
www.dailyenquirer.co.uk
Website Architectural Design
The Daily Enquirer has a client-server architecture. Data is collected, indexed and organized at
the server-site. The server-site is usually the same as the host running the web-server. Users
connect to the website via the web and access the newspaper, the content is subsequently shown
in the client-browser.
Specifically, The Daily Enquirer would’ve a proposed architecture consisting of three layers, in a
distributed client/server environment; the news sources layer, the news packagers layer, and the
readers layer. At first glance this looks complicated and you’re wondering what’re these new
abstract layers contained the client-server architecture, but fear not it’s fairly simple. Firstly,
what is a layer? A layer is a reusable portion of code that performs a specific function. A layer is
usually setup as a project that represents this specific function. This specific layer is in charge of
working with other layers to perform some specific goal. In an application where the client layer
needs to extract information from a backend database, the presentation would utilize a series of
layers to retrieve the data, rather than having the database calls embedded directly within itself. 

The Database Layer is as the name suggests, is simply a database storing data. A more detailed
explanation of this is: The data layer is a separate component whose sole purpose is to serve up
the data from the database and return it to the caller, the key component to most applications is
the data. The data has to be served to the client tier somehow. Through the data layer, data can
be logically reused, meaning that a portion of an application reusing the same query can make a
call to one data layer method, instead of embedding the query multiple times. This is generally
more maintainable.
The Business layer is the systems in place to deliver the business objectives of the website 2.
Though a web site could talk to the data access layer directly, it usually goes through another
layer called the business layer. The business layer is vital in that it validates the input conditions
before calling a method from the data layer. This ensures the data input is correct before
proceeding, and can often ensure that the outputs are correct as well. This validation of input is
called business rules, meaning the rules that the business layer uses to make “judgments” about
the data.
However, business rules don’t only apply to data validation; these rules apply to any calculations
or any other action that takes place in the business layer. Normally, it’s best to put as much logic
as possible in the business layer, which makes this logic reusable across applications.

2
http://www.dailyenquirer.co.uk
One of the best reasons for reusing logic is that applications that start off small usually grow in
functionality. For instance, a company begins to develop a web site, and as they realize their
business needs, they later decide to add a smart client application and windows service to
supplement the web site. The business layer helps move logic to a central layer for “maximum
reusability.”
The client application is basically the end-user, these are the web-browser software used by
various people logging onto the Enquirer’s website and browsing the various WebPages. The
client application layer is the most important layer simply because it’s the one that everyone sees
and uses. Even with a well structured business and data layer, if the client application layer is
designed poorly, this gives the users a poor view of the website and ultimately the newspaper.
It’s best to remove as much business logic out of the UI and into the business layer. This usually
involves more code, but in my mind, the excess time pays off in the end.

The news sources layer consists of news producers that generate the news items and supply
them in some agreed upon markup format. This basically data for the newspaper website, e.g,
pictures, archives, video, audio, etc…
The news packagers layer consists of client/servers that accept items from the news sources and
produce electronic editions of “the news”, including advertisements, etc., based on stereotypes
stemming from demographic information.
The readers layer consists of the end-user client/servers. These accept editions of the news and
produce the individual editions of “the news”. This includes, dynamic layout and assembly and
requesting supplemental material based on the profile or end-user actions.

Various Systems in 3-Tier Design

Sitemaps
The sitemap for the website is huge and contains a large number of links including, current
affairs, sports, politics, education, entertainment, lifestyle, arts, holidays, articles, multimedia,
etc… The reason behind this is that, Brips Consultancy wanted to design the The Daily
Enquirer’s website at its maximum potential. Brips wanted to include every possible option to
make the end-users’ experience beyond words, while tackling factors of accessibility, ease of use,
trust issues, gaining loyalty, aesthetics, flexibility and usability. They often say imitation is the
best form of flattery, we here at Brips Consultancy decided to research the competition and find
out which UK newspapers are leading the race with “The Top 10 UK National Print Newspapers
Online”. Using Nielsen//NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market research, we
looked at the performance of the ten most popular national newspapers in the UK in terms of
audience size, growth and the time spent on the sites. We here at Brips decided to re-use some of
the great aspects of some of the sites and also modify it too The Daily Enquirer’s standards, as
well as improving on some the borrowed ideas.
Homepage
The Daily Enquirer’s website was designed to achieve web presence goals.

Achieving Web Presence Goals:

 Effective site creates attractive presence

 Meets business or organization objectives

 Objectives
 Attract visitors to the Web site
 Make site interesting
 Convince visitors to follow site’s links
 Create impression consistent with organization’s desired image
 Build trusting relationship with visitors
 Reinforce positive image
 Encourage visitors to return

Along with The Enquirer’s design based on achieving web presence goals, the website was also
designed with usability in mind as a forefront of the design and by implementing these factors
was attained.

Website usability:

 Current Web presences

o Few businesses accomplish all goals
o Most fail to provide visitors sufficient interactive contact opportunities
o Improve Web presence
 Make site accessible to more people
 Make site easier to use
 Make site encourage visitors’ trust
 Develop feelings of loyalty toward organization
 Usability testing
DailyEnquirer.co.uk’s 10 Unique
Features
1. Stereotyped content: Group profiles or stereotypes can be generated based on
demographic information linking readers to various sections of the newspaper. Readers
will be categorized by one or more such stereotypes and will receive various special
interest sections, features, advertisements, etc., that meet the constraints of these
stereotypes.

2. Supplemental content: While reading the news, a reader may request additional
information by invoking a hypertext link or by querying a multimedia archive. Such an
archive could be supported directly by the database layer of the newspaper, or it could be
a distributed archive on the Internet, e.g., external links to worldwide news websites,
such as bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, etc...

3. Individual profiles: The client subsystem will actively gather and filter information in
accordance with an individualized reader profile. Such a profile might include gender,
age, interest areas, income level, occupation, ethnic background, lists of products in
which the reader has shown an interest, and reading habits such as preferred depth of
news analysis. These last profile attributes will be updated dynamically as the client
monitors the user's reading activity.

4. Advertisements: The system will feature customized, interactive advertisements that

catch the attention of and involve the reader. These advertisements could gather
information about the reader so that products and product advertising can be
customized and targeted. This supports the trend to maintain marketing databases that
keep track of customer related information.

5. Continuous coverage: The system should augment print-oriented news with real time
access to news stories with continuous coverage. This could include a stock market ticker
tape banner running across the bottom of the screen, a window reporting the latest
sports scores of the user's favourite teams, or late breaking news stories.

6. Interoperability: The proposed system should be able to operate in conjunction with

other systems or software. For example, on-line stock market reports could be
downloaded to spreadsheets for further analysis.

7. Interactive: In addition to advertisements, there should be sections of the paper that

are interactive, such as editorials, classified ads, bridge hands, and crossword puzzles.

8. Community: Stemming from the unique feature of user profiles is community, users
with profiles can now join a virtual community, profiles enable users to comment on
articles, editorials, stories, etc… and be part of The Daily Enquirer’s various forums. But
it doesn’t stop there; their profiles can link to the users’ blogs, social networking sites
(e.g. Facebook, Myspace, etc...).

9. Jobs: A newspaper is an ideal median for employment opportunities advertising, Brips

looked into the possibility of the creating a “Job” system within the website, where
 potential employees post their CVs’ and employers post their adverts. This works by
employers have access to CVs’ of potential employers through an online information
system and vice-versa for employees.

10. Archives: As mentioned above in the company’s profile The Daily Enquirer has a
catalog of 150 years of history in pictures and articles, this available on the website for
users.

Web Portal for Freelancers

Brips Consultancy understood the issue presented to us by Mr. Malcolm regarding the
freelancers and decided to use an intranet service. This enabled a secure portal where
freelancers would be provided with IDs and passwords to log into the system using a Telnet
utility and submit work through a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) utility. FTP is a part of the
TCP/IP rules that defines the formats used to transfer files between TCP/IP-connected
computers. FTP can transfer many files at once or one at a time. The work submitted by the
freelancer is then sent to the business/news packagers layer where the editor decides “who gets
paid”.
Revenue Models
As mentioned above, Mr. Malcolm expressed his desire for the new website to be self-supporting
by it generating its own revenue. The revenue models which permit this would now be
discussed.

Revenue Models

 Web business revenue generating models

o Web catalog
o Digital content
o Advertising-supported
o Advertising-subscription mixed
o Fee-based

 Can work for both sale types

o Business-to-consumer (B2C)
o Business-to-business (B2B)

Digital Content Revenue Models is seen as one appropriate model:

 Online newspaper is a highly efficient distribution mechanism.

o Daily Enquirer owns written information or information rights

 The website could sell published documents’ in digital copies.

 The newspaper can sell publisher subscriptions, such as, monthly subscriptions, annual,
bi-annual, etc…

Advertising-Supported Revenue Models is labeled an appropriate model:

 Advertisers pay money depending on the stickiness, number of visitors or page views.

Advertising-subscription mixed revenue models is the good model

This model has been used for many years by traditional print newspapers; subscribers pay a fee
and accept some level of advertising. On websites that use this model subscribers are subjected
to less advertising than the advertising-supported model.

Conclusion
In conclusion and an appropriate mixture of the models could be utilized for optimum revenue
generation.