Business Overview
The Cookie Lady Hawaii is a small, family-owned business located in Waipahu. They opened in January 2010 and offer a wide variety of delicious cookies, with traditional favorites such as oatmeal and cornflake to unique flavors including mochi crunch (rice crackers) and fruity pebbles. The cookies are available in several different packaging options: containers, 10-cookie pouches, and mini packages (2-3) cookies that are very popular choices for party favors. The shop is experiencing good sales, primarily due to word-of-mouth recommendations. They have a Facebook page but no direct website, although they have recently considered having a website to inform customers about their products and new offerings.
Problem
The Cookie Lady Hawaii has recognized a need for an online web presence and would like to provide customers and potential new customers with information regarding their products and company updates. They would like the website to advertise their cookie products and different packaging options as well as company information (such as business background, directions to their store, etc). The website must be easy for them to maintain and well documented because there is no IT support available for this business after the system’s deployment. Also the site’s integration must be very inexpensive and its continued operation must not be expensive for the owners.
Solution
We will implement a web-site including a comprehensive set of administration functions that will allow them to change product information and provide news updates and company information without the help of an IT professional. Therefore, these back-end administrative features must be as user friendly and bullet-proof as possible. We will assess a number of technology options within our team and choose a technology and implementation path that meets the customer’s needs and constraints. We are already exploring technologies such as Joomla and Drupal for site creation and management.
Our team plans to meet once every two weeks with the owners—Terri and Robert—to keep up on requirements and so they can see how the system is coming along. They will also be invited to our repository (Dropbox) so they can give us updates on their needs and wants for the system.
After our initial meeting with the company owners, we already know that we need to include the following features on the website: product and packaging information and prices, newsletter signup (email listing), customer blog/review/picture page, link to their Facebook page, directions, and upcoming events (calendar).
Teri wants administrator rights to approve customer reviews before they are posted on the website. Since this business is targeting a family market they want to ensure that the reviews are clean and not offensive or slanderous.
Constraints
The site must be very low cost to develop and maintain. The company wants to spend no more than $150 per year on hosting.
No ongoing IT Support for the site. The site must be maintainable by non-IT people.
The site must be ready for production, including all testing and training materials, in 15 weeks.
Risks
The customers are new to having a web-site and don’t really know what they want.
The development team has little experience in fielding web-sites and in the various productivity tools used to deploy them.