Executive Summary Kudler Fine Foods

Executive Summary - Kudler Fine Foods Web Site

James Busch

Web Programming I - WEB/410

University of Phoenix Online

November 27, 2006

Forest Sun

Table of Contents

Executive Summary 1

Customer Perspective 1

Web Site Design 2

Web Site Maintenance 3

Proposed Design Elements 4

Proposed Site Changes 6

Conclusion 8

Storyboard of Proposed Site Changes 9

References a

Executive Summary

Kudler Fine Foods is a local retailer of gourmet foods and ingredients. Through three store-front locations Kudler offers premium products to the local market and regional chefs or restaurants. Since their inception, Kudler Fine Foods has strived to provide the very best customer experience through quality products at reasonable prices and has relied heavily on word of mouth and direct-mail marketing to grow the Kudler brand name. One aspect of the Kudler Fine Foods consumer experience has been their online web presence. The current Kudler Fine Foods Web site is used by many current Kudler customers and the volume of potential clients grows daily as a result of the web presence. Unfortunately, the Kudler Fine Foods website has been in existence and deployment for some time and Kudler Fine Foods has determined that their web presence requires a fresh new look. Learning Team D conducted an analysis of the existing site and was able to determine how effective the current site is from a customer's perspective, how easy it is to maintain, and recommend aesthetic, technological, and functional changes to improve the overall web experience. This document outlines Learning Team D's findings and proposed changes.

Customer Perspective

The current Kudler Fine Foods Web site provides visitors with basic information about the company, the company's mission statement, and general descriptions of the types of products it carries, as well as information about the current three store-front locations. Kudler is in the business of carrying specialty items yet they do not publicize any specific products or manufacturers. From a customer's perspective, this ambiguity leads to confusion regarding the products offered by Kudler Fine Foods over that of any other retailer. Identifying specific product lines or manufacturers via the website could help potential customers decide to take the drive to one of the three area locations to purchase that product and, subsequently, increase sales of other product lines as well.

When considering esthetics, the current web pages seem droll, lackluster, and plain. Currently, the pictures and the details of the products they carried by Kudler Fine Foods are generic and not representative of the fine gourmet inventory offered in the stores. Additionally, the company logo graphic and the background of the pages are outdated and require a fresh new modern look and feel. From a functional aspect, the website links work, although they are inconsistent. The use of underlines with the store hours makes an Internet user believe it is a link when it is not. The site does include working links to MapQuest for a current map of each store location and easy to follow driving directions. Links to the individual store pages provide only an address, phone number and a link to MapQuest. Contact information given includes a local telephone number for each store but provides no other method of relaying feedback or requesting additional gourmet product lines or special orders. Currently, the Kudler website is more of a basic information portal and not a true representation of Kudler Foods, the products they carry, or the specialty items available via custom order. Additionally, the website makes no allowance for the periodic announcement and advertisement of store events such as wine tasting, and cooking classes. The only method of notifying customers on store specific events or sales is through direct contact with the customer in the store or through direct-mail marketing.

Web Site Design

Currently the Kudler website is boring, and is far from the "attention getter" that Kudler had hoped it would be. Kudler hopes that it can increase both web and store traffic by creating a more interesting website. Kudler also has also expressed the desire to make the website easier to maintain. Currently, with the website in its hard coded state, making small changes can turn out to be a fairly difficult. Ultimately, Kudler Fine Foods would like to add additional functionality of allowing users to browse store inventory online and perhaps shop online. However, this does require that Kudler's current website be redesigned in order to facilitate ease of ongoing maintenance of inventory since the current design, while capable of providing such functionality, would require tremendously more laborious effort to maintain.

Web Site Maintenance

Site maintenance for the current Kudler Fine Foods is very difficult given the hard-coded design that was initially chosen. Given new standards of web design and development, and considering Kudler's desire to provide a more attractive and useful website, it would be the recommendation of Learning Team D that Kudler Fine Foods embrace new technology by incorporating Java Server Pages (JSP) connected to their existing product database. Expanding the current product database to include cross-references to an image table would enable a site template to be developed for the consistent display of Kudler products in a familiar and easily navigatable page. Incorporating cascading style sheets (CSS) will further decrease ongoing maintenance by setting a consistent template from which all future new web pages can be based. Cascading style sheets combined with Java Server Pages linked to the production Kudler database will ensure consistent, accurate, and up-to-date information on the Kudler Fine Foods web site and accurate pricing information as well.

Since the corporate product database is already maintained by in-house personnel, deploying the new Kudler Fine Foods website in this manner would result in only a nominal addition of work to the personnel responsible for that function. Other site maintenance