CHAPTER 1:

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Overview

This study focused on design and implementation of charity organization website. It describes the step-by-step process to developing and implementing the website for the organization. In today’s modern world, organizations that want to reach global audiences seize the advantage of internet technology to achieve their goal. Charity organizations also make use of this medium and technology to reach their online audience as well as potentials donors across the world to promote their course and to increase revenue by appealing to their online audience.

For a long lasting solution, a charity origination’s website that will stand taste of time would be designed and implemented using basic programming language such as HTML which is a Mark Up Language, CSS, and Java Script for the design and managing its contents.

As usage of the Internet is increasing, so are the programming languages and content management systems (CMS) for creating webpages. There is a wide range of different programming languages and CMSs to choose from, based on different kinds of frameworks and purpose of which the website is been designed.

A different approach to using a premade programming language and CMS is to create a better website, as Simpson (2005) pursued in his comparative study on a range of different programming languages and open-source CMSs. The categories are freely available systems on the market and the homemade CMSs to give the less experienced developer a clearer view of how programming languages works and how to use them to design and implement a modern website for organizations be it private, public or charity.

1.2 Background and Motivation

In the early days of the World Wide Web (WWW), websites were largely consisting of static pages. In those days, both the task of web designing, development and implementation laid entirely in the hands of the webmasters (Ceri & Bongio, 2000). Content writers were completely dependent on webmasters in order to deploy contents on the web pages. Nowadays, a very suitable solution for such problem is the programming languages and content management systems (CMS) that separate presentation from content and also enable the user to deploy and interact with text, image and other data on a web browser.

In his article, "Content Management and the Separation of Presentation and Content", Clark (2001), discusses the importance of web design and implementation (HTML and CSS combined) for contents as a baseline of web publishing, a technology development that offers a valuable solution to most web design problems and many more.

Programming Language and Content Management (CM) topics often cover a wide range of areas within digital technology. In fact, Miller, (2011), states that Programming Language and CM encompass a broad spectrum of areas including WCMS. Other areas also include Document Management (DM), Knowledge Management (KM), Electronic Content Management (ECM), and Financial Content Management (FCM).

This study specifically covers the web aspect of programming. Miller (2011), defines Web programming as “to the writing, markup and coding involved in Web development, which includes Web content, Web client and server scripting and network security. The most common languages used for Web programming are XML, HTML, JavaScript, Perl 5 and PHP.

Web programming practices and goals vary from organizational to organizational. Cooperate business, charity organization, e-commerce websites, educational institutions and much medium size to large-size organizations use Web programming for their websites, but in different ways.

This leads to differences in terminology and in the names and number of steps in the process. For this reason the researcher will provide different categories and definitions of the Web from various research papers.

Three qualities of the World Wide Web are; Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0. The terms Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 are not in a technical sense, but for describing and characterizing the social dynamics and information processes that are part of the Internet (Berners-Lee, 2002). These notions are based on the idea of knowledge as a threefold dynamic process of cognition, communication, and co-operation. The notion of the Web refers to the qualities of the Web as a techno-social system that enhance human cognition, communication, and co-operation. Cognition is the necessary prerequisite for communication and the precondition for the emergence of co-operation. In other words: in order to co-operate, you need to communicate and in order to communicate you need to cognize. The three types of Web that is identified here are based on an analytical distinction (German & Cowan, 2000). This distinction does not imply a temporal order (such as in versions of a software, where the upper version always exists at a later point of time) or an evolutionary process. The distinction indicates that all Web 3.0 applications (co-operation) and processes also include aspects of communication and cognition and that all Web 2.0 applications (communication) also include cognition. The distinction is based on the insight of knowledge as threefold process that all communication processes require cognition, but not all cognition processes result in communication, and that all co-operation processes require communication and cognition, but not all cognition and communication processes result in co-operation. By cognition we want to refer to the understanding that a person, on a subjective systemic knowledge, connects him- or herself to another person by using certain mediating systems (Roberts, 2010).

When it comes to feedback, the persons enter an objective mutual relationship, i.e., communication. Communicating knowledge from one system to another causes structural changes in the receiving system. From communication processes shared or jointly produced resources can emerge, i.e., cooperation.

These processes represent thus one important dimension, against which qualities of the World Wide Web have to be assessed. Based on this understanding of knowledge as a dynamic process, the three qualities of the World Wide Web are outlined. Accordingly, Web 1.0 can be defined as a tool for cognition, Web 2.0 as a medium for human communication, and Web 3.0 as networked digital technology that supports human cooperation.

Several approaches towards website design and implementation has been enumerated in the last decade, for instance, Calero et al. (2005) presented the Web Quality Model (WQM), which was intended to integrate a web application according to three dimensions: Web Features (content, presentation, and navigation); Quality Characteristics based on the ISO/IEC 9126-1 (2001) (functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, portability, and maintainability); and Lifecycle Processes (development, operation and maintenance) including organizational processes such as project management and reuse programme management.

Ivory et al. (2000) presents a methodology for information-centric websites as follows;

a) Identifying an exhaustive set of quantitative interface measures such as the amount of text on a page, colour usage, consistency, etc.

b) Computing measures for a large sample of rated interfaces

c) Deriving statistical models from the measures and ratings

d) Using the models to predict ratings for new interfaces

e) Validating model prediction.

1.3 Statement of the Problem

In order to both increase visibility and reach a broader range of potential members and donors, most charity organizations rely on the Internet and more specifically on a well designed and implemented easy-to-manage website. Among all the available options and according to the specific specifications, the researcher decided to design and implement the website by means of programming.

Most charity organization websites like to keep online visitors busy and active on their websites by providing fresh and updated articles as often as possible, thus enticing them to revisit over and over again. To accomplish this, the researcher will integrate features that will allow online visitors to participate in content writing, dynamically editing and uploading their content directly on the website. Additionally, the web content management would be made in such a way that administrators do not have to depend on the webmasters for editing and uploading contents. The system will provide features such as the capability to organize article into categories (Schwabe, & Rossi, 2008).

The last problem is to provide access privileges to administrators, editors and contributors. The solution aims at solving the issues described above by developing a web-based content management system with features that separates administrative section for content management and general user section.

These features would allow administrators and content writers to manage their web contents without programming knowledge; other features would be to enable registered members to upload and edit pictures and their profiles.

1.4 Aim and Objectives

The main purpose of this work is the designing and implementation of charity organization website using programming language for the administrators to be able to manage the web contents without necessarily being knowledgeable in web programming. The website would represent the charity organization and convey its message to the current members and Trustees as well as to potential donors. Members, Trustees and donors would be able to contribute to the organization through the donations page and button and the administrators to manage all online donations. Registered users would be allowed to perform several different actions on their registered profile (e.g. manage donation records, manage photo albums and personal information).

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