Website Evaluation - Critical report

Website Evaluation - Critical report
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Introduction
Website design and development involves series of steps that makes it possible to come
up with quality website that meets all the requirements. Software development should follow
some methodologies such as waterfall, agile or spiral. To beginners, waterfall methodology is
highly recommended and as such, it was adopted in Tribute Ltd website development. Software
development should adhere to some principles such as usability, reusability and simplicity
(Youngblood & Mackiewicz 2012, p. 586). Every software designer should be able to address
and follow all required design principles and development methodologies. Similarly, system
design should follow other design factors such as number of users, appealing colors and
arrangement of menus. Development life cycle should follow the following steps; idea inception,
requirement analysis and design, planning, coding and design, system testing, verification and
validation as well as maintenance.
System requirements and analysis
This step involves collection and analysis of website requirements and specifications. In
this case, software designer is required to engage system users as well as other experts in order to
be able to capture clearly all system functionalities (Liu et al. 2011, p. 548). During development
of Tribute Ltd website, the idea of building the website was driven by the need to capture many
customers through advertisement of their products. To make development a success, it was very
important to analyze all customers’ expectations. Despite customers, website owner
specifications had to be considered to make sure website functionalities are accurately met
(Dickinger & Stangl 2013, p. 774). It is from collection of requirements and specifications that
design and development of scalable and responsive website was possible. One of the key
requirements was that, website should have a home page which explain the nature of business

and consumers’ of the services. Analysis had to be done when selecting suitable language for use
in website design. This was a crucial decision because there are variety of languages that can be
used to design websites. Both functional and non-functional were captured at this level.
Website design and development
At this stage, all requirements from either side had to be turned into reality. During the
design, software developer had to factor aspects such as page layout. Page layout determines
how system users are able to access web pages, the content to access and how the content would
be displayed. Development of Tribute Ltd website followed modular programming which groups
code into modules. Each module is designed to have a specific functionality, for instance
cascading style sheet (CSS) module is used to design appearance and arrangement of web pages.
Modular system development was adopted to make code editing and website redesigning easy
when need arise (Youngblood & Mackiewicz 2012, p. 585). It is only through use of CSS that,
appeal of the system was and scaling of image was achieved. Additionally, CSS made it possible
to style menu bar and divide home page into different sections. Gallery section presents images
to be viewed by the system users. It is from this section that all products and services are
displayed to customers’. Contact page was designed to make possible for any system user to get
contact details and information on when to contact and expect feedback. Finally, customer query
was designed to make it simple for customers’ to raise their concerns. The design and
development of the website has been done through use of HTML, CSS and PHP.
Website Testing and Deployment
Design had to be coupled by several testing methods in order to remove bugs and
enhance security. Since there are various types of software testing, code testing during design