Information Technology
Introduction
Information Technology (IT) is continuously becoming a center stage in businesses. IT has unwittingly become the basis for competitions amongst some of the leading business domains in the world. Small to medium-sized companies have managed to grow and expand beyond their geographical positions thanks to IT. However, technology is continuously changing and embracing some of these changes can be the success factor for any company.
An online presence through the use of websites has become a necessity in today’s digital world. Either the business is big or small, a website is now being used to establish credibility about a business. The site helps a company to increase visibility and create trust among new and existing customers. There is a probability for a new customer to carry out research first before deciding to engage with the business. As such, having a great website play a crucial part in ensuring a company remains competitive in the market while attracting new customers.
Problem Statement
Having gone through your website at https://www.finetouch.co.ke/ and having interacted with the navigation system on the site, I have made several observations. First, the website’s navigation system is somehow tricky. Registering your customers as part of the business process is very critical especially when you want to interact with them. Having a registration form as part of the navigation menu helps customer to register with the system quickly. The registration form should only appear if the client has not logged in.
Secondly, too many colors have been used on the website. Green, white, blue, red, orange, grey and black colors have been used. A good color scheme that reflects the theme of the company can attract the right audience and keep the reader interested in your products.
Thirdly, elements have been cluttered all over the page making it look untidy and unorganized. The logo and the contact card are not correctly aligned. Facebook at a glance and rain gun action don’t explain anything to the user. They have just been placed on the home page. Also the last section scrolling horizontally also don’t have a proper meaning to the website. Clients have to figure out what it means. The about page has a login link as a drop down. The about page should only provide information about the company and its products.
Fourthly, your website is running on Joomla. Joomla is a content management system (CMS) that has plenty to offer. It relies on plugins to create a meaningful website. These plugins must receive support from their creators in order to remain up to date. Also, some of the plugins are free while others are proprietary. Content management systems have many disadvantages especially for business that need deeper customizations. First, a website running on Joomla must rely on the updates provided by the creators of particular plugins. Without such updates, the website will not reflect modern website designs. Secondly, with Joomla, you are limited in what you can edit about the content on the pages since page layouts are pre-built. Such layout may not reflect what the company needs.
Joomla is constantly under attack. Most of these compromises take advantage of the fact that any PHP file a hacker can sneak onto the Joomla site somewhere accessible invoke it via its URL and then compromise the site. Although Joomla has many extensions that can be used to build a website quickly, these extensions are constantly interfering with each other resulting in a poor looking website. Lastly, Joomla is complicated to maintain. Analyzing website code is fundamentally hard because the system generates a combination of HTML and JavaScript code to be executed on a client machine.
Solutions
The look and the feel of your website determine the experience your customers will have while interacting with the website. Good looking websites that have been designed following modern user interface design have the probability of increasing customer experience and hence attracting many customers than websites that don’t follow current website standards.
For your website, a lot can be improved to reflect modern UX design. The number of colors can be reduced to minimal to reflect the theme of the company. The website layout can also be improved to provide the simplicity and neatness needed in modern websites. The navigation system can also be enhanced so that users don’t have to scroll and click through many pages in order to find what they need. The login and registration pages will be placed in the navigation menu and make it available when they are required. The logo will also be improved to look more modern and attractive.
In order to make the above changes, the current technology being used has to change to one that is more extensible, secure, flexible, debuggable and robust. Joomla runs on PHP programming language. Although all programming languages are hackable, python programming language is much easier and secure to use than PHP. Therefore, the above changes can be implemented using Python and Django framework. Django is fundamentally more secure because its code is run as a process. A hacker cannot add a python file to the site and then access it – everything is accessed through specified URL patterns and invoked in the python processes. This does not make Django invulnerable – it still has its issues with SQL injection and other forms of attack, but it is a much harder target than Joomla. Django/Python provides a wonderful interactive environment for analyzing and stepping through the code that generates the templates so that it is relatively easy to work out what is going on. Furthermore, Django comes with a comprehensive test suite built in making test supported development very easy. Django is such a clear framework (it is just Python) that I generally use it by default for any web application.