Understanding and Addressing Access Issues for Online Businesses

In today's digital age, the success of online businesses hinges on their ability to cater to a diverse audience. Understanding access issues is paramount to ensuring inclusivity and reaching a wider customer base. Factors such as demographics, equipment, privacy, connection speeds, website design, and user behavior play crucial roles in determining how people access websites.

Demographic Factors in Accessing Websites 

A. Disparities in access based on income and ethnicity highlight the digital divide that persists in society. Lower-income and minority communities often face barriers to accessing the internet, impacting their ability to engage with online businesses effectively. 

B. Variations between Hispanic, Black, and White families in internet access underscore the need for tailored approaches to reach different demographics and bridge the digital gap.

Impact of Equipment and Privacy on Web Access 

A. The type of equipment used for web access significantly influences user experience. Businesses must optimize their websites for compatibility with various devices to ensure accessibility for all users. 

B. Privacy concerns, such as data security and tracking, can deter users from accessing certain websites. Addressing these concerns is essential for building trust and fostering engagement.

Discrepancies in Connection Speeds 

A. Disparity between customer connection speeds and company standards can lead to frustration and abandonment of websites. Businesses must prioritize optimizing their platforms to accommodate users with slower internet connections. 

B. Slower connection speeds adversely affect user experience, leading to longer loading times and decreased engagement. This underscores the importance of efficient website design and content delivery.

Challenges with Website Design 

A. Heavy graphics and multimedia elements can impede website loading times, particularly for users with limited bandwidth. Employing strategies like image optimization can mitigate these challenges and enhance accessibility. 

B. Issues with plug-ins and complex features can hinder user engagement and accessibility. Streamlining website design and minimizing dependencies on external plugins can improve usability across different platforms and devices.

User Behavior and Website Accessibility 

A. Users exhibit a tendency to abandon slow-loading websites, emphasizing the importance of optimizing performance to retain visitors and maximize conversions. 

B. Overly complex designs risk alienating customers and diminishing user satisfaction. Prioritizing simplicity and intuitive navigation enhances accessibility and improves overall user experience.

Addressing Variances in Equipment and Connection Speeds 

A. Researching the customer base is essential for understanding their preferences and limitations regarding web access. This insight enables businesses to tailor their strategies and optimize website performance accordingly. 

B. Designing websites with the lowest common denominator in mind ensures accessibility for users with diverse equipment and connection speeds. Prioritizing simplicity, efficiency, and compatibility fosters inclusivity and enhances user satisfaction.

In conclusion, addressing access issues is crucial for online businesses to reach and engage with a diverse audience effectively. By understanding and accommodating factors such as demographics, equipment, privacy, connection speeds, website design, and user behavior, businesses can optimize their online presence and foster long-term success.
Understanding and Addressing Access Issues for Online Businesses

Platform for e-business

What is e-business? E-business is simply the electronic exchange of goods and services including business, trade, buying and selling from businesses to consumer, that is transacted electronically. A successful e-business requires a well-coordinated plan that takes into account among many other elements, design competency, programming abilities (transactional and databases), server configuration public relations and sales and marketing abilities.

Selling and transacting can be done to the world wide web, which is the global combination of links, information, web pages and e-commerce websites. All of this delivered via the internet and infrastructure of computers all linked together.

The person can have the best product or service in the world; but if the website doesn’t provide intuitive navigation, offer an easy-to-use process for order and fulfillment and maintain high standard of quality control, you will never archive consistent customer satisfaction.

A website is an infinite number of web pages connected by a common theme and purpose. A good design is important to provide your customers with easy access to all of your website’s pages. The goal is to increase the business by making it easier for customers to shop, and if the website’s lack technology and marketing make it difficult for them, they may as well drive to the mall.

Careful considerations of the numerously design possibilities for website is essential. From technical perspective, e-commerce sites require a catalog, shopping cart and payment processing mechanism, at a minimum. More typical, though e-commerce sites encompass a wide range of advanced, value added feature.
Platform for e-business

Thumbnail image

A thumbnail image is a smaller version of the image itself. The thumbnail is used as a link that when clicked, will load the full-sized image. It contains all of the most important aspects of an image, but is considerably smaller.

For ease of placement on the screen, images in a group are usually reduced to approximately the same thumbnail size as each other. In other words, the thumbnail for a large image is roughly the same size as the thumbnail for a medium-sized image.

Loading image can take long time, depending on the size and the complexity of the image. Using a thumbnail image gives a visitor the opportunity to decide whether to view the full-sized image.

Creating a thumbnail image does not modify the original image; it instead generates a new, but smaller, image.

The image is typically reduced to a predetermined maximum dimension while constraining its proportions so as not to distort it. This maximum dimension is usually applied to the width or the height, depending upon whether the image’s orientation is landscape or portrait.
Thumbnail image

Cyber attack of pharming

Pharming attacks redirected traffic way from a legitimate website towards a false site, for example one that has been set up to look like a legitimate bank’s homepage. The term ‘pharming’ has existed since 1996, but it was not until late 2003, that the technique actually emerged in the service do cyber criminals.

Pharming attacks are similar to phishing attacks in that they are designed to extract confidential data from victims by pretending to be a trusted source and requesting information.

The difference is that pharming attacks resolve the victim’s DNS to a malicious server when attempting to visit a legitimate website. Pharming can be conducted either by altering the hosts file on a victim’s computer or by exploitation of a vulnerability in DNS server software. Redirects of this nature are often facilitated by malware already downloaded and installed on the victim’s machine and represent a one-to-many attack directed at the widest possible network of victims.

It is a form of online fraud very similar to phishing as pharmers rely upon the same bogus websites and theft of confidential data.
Cyber attack of pharming

Content provider

Content provider creates and provides content that it makes available online through its own website or through an intermediary, such as content platform to customers.

They are the companies that operate an internet-based service. Their core competence is the creation and managing of content and the relationships with those who use, enhance, or support the content. Content is much more than just the written word.

Content is much more than just the written word. It’s the many elements that combine to make a site, including text, images, audio, video and community.

As the number of e-commerce web sites increases, so does the demand for content. A web site operator pays various content provider for news stories, information and other online content in order to attract users to the site.

Alternatively, the web site operator might hire a content provider to created new content specifically for the web site. Content providers generally want to focus on what they are good at, which is developing content – films, weather forecasts, travel information, educational material and so on.
Content provider

What is page view?

When a visitor requests a page for website, it counted as one visit. Each page loaded by a visitor counts as a page view.

A page view is counted the successful loading of any document containing content that was requested by a website visitor, regardless of the mechanism of delivery or number and frequency with which said content is requested.

It is actual visitor views or request for information, regardless of the number of images or objects necessary to construct said page.

It can be measured as a visitor’s interest in particular website and the basis for visitor’s clickstream, the sequential list of pages a visitor seeds during his visit.

In practical usage, page views, provide an easy way to convey the popularity of a page or section of the website.

Page view is displayed when the visitor first start FrontPage. But it can be displayed at any time by selecting the view page command or by clicking the page icon n the Views pane.

If the visitor reloads a page, that typically counts as a new page view; likewise if visitors navigate to another page in the site and then return to a page; that will count as a new page view.

If the page contains an ad, the page load is called an ad view.

Many companies view page views as an important element that indicates a visitor’s overall interest in the website.
What is page view?

Performance inside the Website

Long download times are unnecessary and unprofitable. Making a potential customer wait for your website to download is a surefire way to increase your competitors’ bottom line, not yours.

There are many reasons why a page may load slowly, e.g. the size of the pipe to the internet, the traffic hitting the web-hosting service and/or the server hosting your website the robustness of the web server etc.

But at this juncture you just need to ensure that your website’s design is not a contributing factor when a customer experiences a slow download.

So keep your homepage less than 200 KB in size. By doing this, your website will load in less than 20 seconds with a 56 K modem.

If your must display graphics on your homepage keep in mind the different graphic formats that are available each with its own qualities and capabilities an what is best to use in specific situation.

Most website based images use “indexes color” which is only 8 bits (one byte) of color per pixel. This means that the image can display only 256 colors.

If you pick the right colors, even a color photo can be made to look presentable on your website.

GIF and JPEG (also known as JPG) are the most commonly supported formats throughout the world. GIF stands for “Graphic Interchange (Image) format.”

CompuServe developed the GIF format so that its subscribers could send image files to each other and the images could be viewed in different kinds of computers.

JPEG stands for “Joint Photographic Experts Group.” JPEG s perhaps the bets format to use photographs since it support full 24 bit color.
Performance inside the Website

What is your line?

Ask yourself if your product/service will translate to a virtual market, i.e., the Web. If the answer is “yes” decide which website model you want to build and consider what your website is going to offer.

Then build your website and expend your efforts in driving customers to that website.

If you are an entrepreneur find your niche market, design your website for that market and then let your customer know you are open and ready for business.

If the answer is “no”, a website still may be a necessity – due to the frowing power of web customer who expect the vast majority of all business to have some sort of a web presence.

Build a good brochureware site that will drive customers to your brick and mortar business.

Use that website to provide detailed information about your company, your products and services, as the first tier in your customer service support efforts (FAQ, online manuals and other documentation, knowledge base, etc); and perhaps even incorporate a forum for your customers to converse with each other about your products and services.
What is your line?

Weblog

It’s difficult t define of website, mainly due to diversity of models adopted for individual weblogs (also known as “blogs”).

This interesting weblog can be defined: “A web page containing brief, chronologically arranged items of information. A weblog can take the form of a diary, journal, what’s new page, or links to other websites.”

The key to the popularity of weblog is the person or people producing it. Since weblog readers often develop relationships with the weblog author(s), interaction between reader and author is inevitable.

But you don’t necessarily need to establish a new website to attract a niche audience of readers.

Since weblogs are ideally suited to interaction between people sharing special interest, some e-commerce businesses may want to consider adding a weblog to their website.

A weblog’s capacity for information dissemination and feedback can tap into buying power of a blogging community.
Weblog

Online Store

An online store is a website where consumers buy products or services. This types of site is most commonly referred to as an e-commerce site or a “B2C” (business to consumer) site.

In addition to most, if not all, of the content found in a brochureware site an online displays products/services along with detailed information ((e.g. specifications and pricing) usually from a database with search features, a method for online purchase.

An online store, must also provide extensive information about the products/services offered that not only aids in attracting consumers, but gives them enough confidence in the seller and the products/services to take the next step – making an online purchase.

If choose to take online payments, you must provide a secure, reliable, cost effective system for authorizing payments and managing transactions.

The best systems are based on the secure Socket Layer and/or Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) encryption technology, which provide the encryption of data and generate and display a “result page” to the customer following the transaction.

Further, a successful online store must be designed with the ability to store orders in a database or as tab-delimited text files so the data can be imported into an invoicing system. Then the website must be able to intelligently route encrypted email to the order fulfillment division.
Online Store