Website Development - Indepth Study

The Bizzby project was commenced in 2006 to develop a website providing customers and traders (suppliers) with a portal where they could negotiate for services.

The website is now live as a beta version in Bracknell, Maidenhead and High Wycombe with almost 400 suppliers.

Here's a short study on how Hansam went about developing the site.

Bizzby brings Customers and Suppliers together in a new way. Customers and Suppliers can create jobs for other Suppliers to carry out. When the job is posted on the website, it is matched to Suppliers who are notified by email and text message.

The Suppliers bid against each other for the job and the Customers choose which price they want to pay. Once the Supplier has accepted the job, a commission is paid to Bizzby.

After the job has been done, the Customers and Suppliers review each other to build confidence in the service.

Stage 1 of any complex development is to map out the requirements as a User Requirement. As the site has many functions this took a great deal of time, weeks in fact, before we got to a stage where we could obtain a realistic idea on cost. The site was then stage developed with the following functional areas:

Public Area - Home Page, About Us, Contact etc
Membership Area for Customers
Membership Area for Suppliers
Job Posting Functions
Auction Functions (bidding etc)
Reviews

When members register they choose whether to be a customer or a supplier. Suppliers can add details of professional qualifications and they are streamed into professional certification categories - Bronze, Silver or Gold. When customers add a job, the website automatically matches the customer and supplier and sends messages by email/text inviting suppliers to bid.

Suppliers bid against each other for the job and, once the bidding has ended the customer chooses their preferred supplier. After the job is completed reviews can be added to enhance online reputation.

After an "Alpha" trial the site was developed into a new look and feel bringing together some of the suggestions that were obtained during testing.

Hansam Internet created the user requirements, project managed the development and managed the content development up to launch in April 2008.

The development is hosted on a dedicated server managed by Hansam Internet.