UC IRVINE - ICS 125 PROJECT IN SYSTEM DESIGNPROJECT DESCRIPTION |
Project Vision:
To provide the best floral buying experience on the web and to make available this
same tool to every florist in America which could potentially make Flowersweb.com the
floral portal of the 21st Century. If you have a strong academic background and
a real thirst for success in a real-life project, please consider the following task.
This is a great opportunity for a TEAM of serious programmers who truly want to
solidify their resume.
Overview:
FlowersWeb.com is a secure E-commerce floral site which launched two years ago and is
in need of a totally new web site using the latest and greatest software tools and
techniques. Documentation is of the essence in this project. Also, since some of our new
features may be patent-able non-disclosure agreements are required by project members.
The current site gives customers a variety of features such as:
1- E-mail reminders for anniversaries,
2- Frequent Shopper Program keeps track of customer’s purchases and shows the running
total so customers can redeem free flowers after certain milestones (similar to airlines
frequent flyer miles).
3- Customers can search products by choosing what occasion, price and product they wish.
4- Customers can select flowers for International delivery by clicking on a specific
Country.
5- Site allows one to register and thus reap the benefits of “membership”.
6- Customers that register can maintain a list of recipients for future purchases (a
personal directory) available only to them.
7- On the backend, the site is completely dynamically generated, thus allowing easy and
immediate editing of products, prices, descriptions, etc. and similar search/editing
capabilities for customers database.
8- The site keeps the customer data on file whether the person registers or not.
9- Bulk E-mail capabilities to all users for direct marketing.
10- Some editable text messages on certain pages.
11- The site transmits the order to our in-house Unix system via modem within three
minutes of receiving the order.
Due to the amount of work we believe two teams are needed for the whole project. Thus
we think that SOW items 1 through 5 should be one team & items 6 -10 should be
another. However we are flexible on this (should more teams want to participate).
Statement of Work:
1-The goal is to build from scratch a new web site using the best tools currently
available so that the current features (some of which are shown above) and others to be
discussed later can be added making Flowersweb.com the ultimate flower site on the
Internet. Floral arrangement images are already available in JPG formats. No additional
Photoshop type work is needed.
2- Additionally the site must be duplicated using different domains so that ultimately
identical sites can be leased to florists around the country and hosted by FlowersWeb
servers but linked together via a back end administration page so that control over what
images the individual sites show can be maintained as well as “other”
administrative tasks. For instance reporting capabilities for total $$ sales per site,
total number of orders between a certain time frame, etc.
3- Since individuality between florists is needed, three to five graphical options are
required so that florists have a choice of what their personal site will look like,
keeping the back end the same.
4- It would be ideal if certain mutually agreed upon options were modules that we were
able to turn on and off. For instance, not all sites may require International
capabilities or Cybersource. This would allow the site to be leased at a lower rate, etc.
5- In order to keep costs down to a minimum, a secure front-end interface is required so
that each independent florist can enter their own personal data, such as “About
us”, “Our Guarantee”, “Special Offers”, Ending messages on order
confirmations, etc. This will allow each retailer to change it at will without requiring
any of our intervention and associated costs. Many pages will be the same for all sites
(i.e.: How it works).
6- A Firewall should be selected and installed to secure possible hack attacks.
7- Secure credit card transactions should be done by Cybersource (Cybercash may be ok,
let’s discuss it).
8- The Affiliate program (www.theaffiliateprogram.com)
software should be installed to begin large-scale marketing program. This is a simple
install that they will do for us.
9- Once the customer places the order and it has been approved, the question then is how
to get the order details “into” the flower shop’s mainframe system without
any retyping. We have a software tool that successfully and seamlessly addresses this for
our Unix SCO computer system. However it will be required that other systems be able to
accept the data so that ultimately the florist can seamlessly receive orders without
having to check the web site. Particularly at holidays, the volume is quite high and thus
the orders must be sent directly to the flower shop for immediate processing, whether they
have our type of computer system, or any of four other platforms.
10-Once the main site is up, we will market it via doorway pages using Web Position Gold.
Project Requirements:
The current hardware is a Sun Ultra II with dual 200 Mhz processors and 512 MB of ram
(owned by Flowersweb, Inc.) and Sun Solaris (latest rev). The additional software can be
(but is not limited to) Cold Fusion, Apache server, Oracle relational database, or similar
programs. An eye towards multiple servers and having a multiple swappable hard drive array
for ultimate performance must be kept (as this is eventually our goal).
The Challenge:
1-Having many sites running without over tasking the servers is among other things a
function of optimum database programming. One poorly designed site can be slower than
dozens of well designed ones (considering all would be running on the same servers). At
launch, Flowersweb.com received over 350,000 hits over a 24-hour period (Valentine’s
’98). Volume is higher than you think at holidays, thus expect the worst and triple
it.
2- A floral site is very graphic intensive and every page may have several pictures so it
tends to slow down the site. Thus the site must be designed from the ground up keeping
download time at the top of the priorities.
3- Being able to seamlessly download the order without any re-typing into our computer is
one reason for our growth. Being able to do it for most shops in the country, regardless
of their platform is the key to ultimate success.
Constraints:
Based on our learning curve, we have what we think is a very simple order process
already, no need to re-invent the wheel, but if you can do it better, we are all ears.
Thus the only constraint is your imagination.
Customer Contact:
FlowersWeb, Inc.
Al Devile, President
714-965-1000, E-mail: aldevile@gte.net www.flowersweb.com
ICS125 WQ00 Project Opportunities
ICS125 WQ00
David F. Redmiles Home Page
Department of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine CA 92717-3425