Brief:
This new business will be a niche online retailer selling colourful and interesting products from Asia, such as: furniture, silk scarves, storage boxes, vases and art.
The Aim of this website is to give the visitors and users the ability to view and buy products from a simple, clean, stylish and professional website.
I have been considering Joomla/PHP. I WOULD ESPECIALLY LIKE OFFSHORE DEVELOPMENT, PROBABLY ASIA AS I WANT TO KEEP THE COST DOWN.
The graphic design for the logo and some additional graphics will be supplied separately via a graphic designer.
It is thought that the site will be mainly white in background colour and uses the website [login to view URL] as a guideline for the visual setting for the products, although this site is much bigger than anything that I am trying to do.
There will be about 30 products in this site but we need a scaleable facility via CRM that allows us to add and subtract categories, sub categories and products at will. The category breakdown will be something like this:
- Furniture - 10 total items (including variations of colour and size)
- Scarves - 15 total items (including variations of type, colour and size)
- Bird Cages - 2 items
The website must be centrally justified on the screen and to a fixed width resolution of 1055 pixels.
Hosting will support PHP development and MySQL and be sourced from a UK supplier. I must have all hosting and ftp control, as well as administration control. Separate access will be made for a developer and be changed by myself after the projectâs completion.
The developer is required to provide a mock up that will show the stages for the following website components:
⢠Product display, including attachment to the shopping cart process and images that open in a box over the original page (each item will have a different number of additional big view images, a maximum of 5 is required). See below for an example.
Agreement over which operating systems and browsers will be developed and testing for.
⢠Each product will come with image(s) a heading / title and up to about 6 sentences of text. A shortened version of this text might be used on a homepage description (for example, if the product is âfeaturedâ or a âspecial offerâ). A link to âemail this to a friendâ should be included on every product
⢠Subscription process. Users can choose to leave their details so that at regular intervals I can mail out new products or special offers.
⢠Email broadcasting. I may not be able to afford this aspect or the developer may not be able to provide it but if possible I would like to mail out from a database, as in above bullet. In the emails I would like an âauto-unsubscribeâ facility which can be found at the bottom of the emails and in the âcontact usâ page of the website. I would also like to be able to manually add users date to the database.
⢠I would like to provide âquick linksâ access to products and this could be via drop down links on the home page
⢠I would like to initially provide ability to receive payments via PayPal but at a later date, I may acquire online merchant ability via a UK bank.
⢠I want the website to be as search engine friendly as possible, so there will be no flash and the navigation must be expandable on one click not using javascript.
⢠I have a google analytics account and will provide tracking code for inclusion.
⢠There needs to be the ability to âPrint this pageâ (in the way it displays on the screen both Mac and Windows), as well as a button to âemail / printâ the ecommerce transaction.