Technical Issues to be considered:
Next, we come to web-site design and development. How do we make our web site attractive and easy to use?
What tools do we use to develop and maintain it? The issues on ease of use may include a trade-off on `attractiveness‘, i.e. good graphics and photographs and download times. One would expect photographs of locations and accommodation on a travel company web-site but we might have to be careful and separate indexes, pricing, availability and booking pages from the photographs to allow quick and easy navigation around the site, with the slower downloading of photographs, cross-referenced to be accessed on demand.
Issues of security (integrity of booking data, security of payment data) need to be designed in to the system. For transmission of payment details (credit cards etc) encryption may need to be considered. When is a transaction and booking completed?
Can provisional bookings be made? Also, we may need to consider issues of back up; if there is a service disruption can we design in `graceful degradation‘, and provide a partial service?
We need to plan for operational issues, where is the web site to be hosted and how do we plan for the assurance of business continuity? We may also need to consider telephone call centre support or clerical answering of e-mail queries. Finally we need to monitor the business and operational effectiveness of the system and to plan for maintenance, updating and eventual replacement.