THE COOOPERATIVE UNIVERSITY OF KENYA

DIRECTORATE OF COMPUTING AND E-LEARNING

(DCel)

IMPLEMENTATION OF ACCESSABILITY ON ONLINECAR SHOWROOM

WEBSITE

SUBMITTED BY: KENNEDY NJAU

DBITC01/0026/2016

A project proposal submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of a
Diploma in Information Technology
 DECLERATION
I hereby declare that the work presented here is entirely my own original work except where
acknowledged and it has never been presented to any other institution of higher learning for the
award of diploma or any other certificate.

Signature Date..

Albert Byrone

APPROVAL
I hereby certify that this research report has been prepared under my supervision and submitted
with my approval.

Mr. Mideko

Lecturer DCel

Signature .. Date.
 DEDICATION
I sincerely dedicate this project report to my family Mr. and Mrs. Raphael Sammy for their
support financially and also to Brighet Ndwiga for the care and support during the period not
forgetting all my friends at the cooperative university of Kenya.
 ACKWOLEDGEMENT
I would like to pay my attribute to all those who have enabled me to complete this report
successfully. It has only been successful through their patience, encouragement, direction which
has been of great help to me.

Special thanks goes to my parents Mr. and Miss. Raphael Sammy, who has been of great support
to me, being a source of inspiration and supporting me financially and morally throughout the
research.

I am also grateful to Mr. Mideko Lecturer at CUK who kindly advised me as I wrote my report
and guided me towards achieving this noble objective.

To all my friends: Brighet Ndwiga who has always offered her time and support to me, Wesley
Ouma, David Mitch who have born with me during this period of writing the report. I am truly
indebted to you all .I also acknowledge and thank all my friends and colleagues whom I have not
mentioned for their special way in which they supported me.

Last but not least I thank the Almighty God for keeping me alive and providing me with strength
to carry on and to complete the report
List of abbreviations

CERN European Organization Of Nuclear Research

HTTPD Hypertext Transfer Protocols

W3C World Wide Consortium

WWW World Wide Web

URL Uniform Resource Locator

HTML Hypertext Markup Language

PHP Hypertext Preprocessor

SQL Structured Query Language

WYSIWYG What You See Is What You Get

List of figures
 Table of Contents
DECLERATION............................................................................................................................. ii

APPROVAL ................................................................................................................................... ii

DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................... iii

ACKWOLEDGEMENT ................................................................................................................ iv

List of abbreviations ................................................................................................................ v

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 9

Background of the study ............................................................................................................. 9

Problem statement ....................................................................................................................... 9

Objectives of the study ................................................................................................................ 9

General objectives ................................................................................................................... 9

Specific objectives ................................................................................................................. 10

Research questions .................................................................................................................... 10

Significance of the study ........................................................................................................... 10

The buyers ............................................................................................................................. 10

Scope of the study.................................................................................................................. 11

CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................... 11

Introduction ............................................................................Error! Bookmark not defined.

The current website. .............................................................................................................. 11

Previous Studies done in the area .......................................................................................... 12

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 15

The proposed website ............................................................................................................ 16

CHAPTER THREE:SYSTEM ANALYSIS ................................................................................. 17

Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 17
Waterfall Model ........................................................................................................................ 17

System analysis ......................................................................................................................... 18

Summarization of the current websites. .................................................................................... 18

Technical and functional requirements of the proposed online system .................................... 18

Hardware requirements.......................................................................................................... 18

Software requirements ........................................................................................................... 18

Usability Requirements ......................................................................................................... 18

Security Requirements ........................................................................................................... 19

Operational Requirements ..................................................................................................... 19

System Users ......................................................................................................................... 19

Functional Requirements ....................................................................................................... 19

Non-Functional Requirements .................................................................................................. 19

Choice of Development Environment ................................................................................... 20

Data collection tools .................................................................................................................. 20

Questionnaire ......................................................................................................................... 20

Internet research .................................................................................................................... 21

 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

Background of the study

ONLINE SHOWROOM WEBSITE is a website that deals with online display of new products
and cars from any Car dealer Company. This reduces the bridge between the buyers and car
dealers since one does not have to come at that particular dealers shop to view the products and
the car but instead it can be viewed through any device.

Problem statement
The method used by the car manufactures to air their new model of cars should be faster and
easily accessible to the public. The process should be optimized for time efficiency and also
should be straight forward enough that the products can be easily accessible to the public.

However, the current method used to view and bind the new cars is an inefficient use of time and
resources. By buyers wasting time to travel to that particular location to view the car in
showroom and also wasting resources in terms of the transport used.

The inefficiency of the method used presents financial burden for the companies. Where the
companies waste a lot of resources in terms of money to move the new cars to different location
to be viewed by the public and also the time the new products take before reaching the public.

Using the showroom website proposed, there would be no need for the transportation of the new
model of cars to be viewed instead they would be posted on this website and would be accessed
anywhere and anytime. This would reduce the use of resources and make the cars to reach the
market faster.

Objectives of the study

General objectives
The general objective of the website is to reduce the bridge between the car dealers and the
buyers when buying new cars in the market and also to determine the customer as well as
retailers preferences regarding different brands of cars in the market. It involves the study of
consumers buying behavior and attitudes towards a variety of attributes and factors, which help
them in decision-making when choosing and buying cars.
Specific objectives
The specific objectives of the study include:

a. To increase customers satisfaction through online viewing of the cars of choice.

b. To improve sale rate where customers can just view the car online and bind it if
interested.
c. To reduce the bridge between the car dealers and the buyers.

Research questions
1. What challenges to you get when moving from your location to the dealers location to
view the new car in the market?
2. How fast does it take you to get information if or not a new car is in the market?
3. How much does is cost you to buy a car inclusive and exclusive of the transport used?

Significance of the study

The study will be fundamental to:

The car dealer

The website will help the car dealers in advertisement of their new products over a wider area

It will also help in online marketing of their products.

It will also help them in data collection where the buyers will give them feedback.\this will help
in analyzing the better brand of cars needed mostly by the buyers

The buyers
The website will also ease the buying of the new cars .This will reduce the cost used by not
catering for transport from their location to the cars location. It will also give the buyers a chance
for a wider viewing of products from different manufactures. This will also allow them to
compare prices and give their feedback about the products.
Scope of the study
The study was carried out through an online research.it involves viewing of different cars
website and how they air out their new products and how they get to reach their customers on
time.

CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter gives a summary of the literature that has been researched by other people. It
involves the strength and limitation of the current website, relatedwork, conclusion and finally
the proposed website.

Introduction
With the advancement in web technologies and its embracement by people, website
has made a significant transition from simple and static websites to dynamic, multimedia rich
websites, capable of interacting with visitors in a sophisticated way. Webdevelopment is an ever-
changing phenomenon, highly sensitive to all the expectationsand requirements of a modern web
user. Web development need to harmonize the purpose of the website as well as its
structure and interface with the expectations of the users. Usercentered design is thesolution to
meet the expectations of the target web users.Defining the audience of thewebsite, which will be
created, requires fulfilling the significant research in order totake the road of success. The notion
of web design and development is too broad andversatile; hence, it is not an easy task to define
some common features or trendsfavored by both web developers and users. Managing web
quality from the perspective of web developer requires understandingof the web server where
site will be hosted, script language to be used at server andclient end, browser compatibility
issues at client end, web design and programming. Web quality from the perspective of web user
is more tilted towards its usability, satisfaction and legibility. The content quality is again a
major issue which promptsuser to seek information from reputed websites.

The current website.

Over the years different car companies has been using an overall website where they give more
attention to other products that the new products only living a page for a showroom site. This
makes them to air out their new cars leaving out more relevant information about that new car
which may attracts the customers attention.

History and Previous Studies done in the area

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist. He was born in London, and his parents
were early computer scientists, working on one of the earliest computers.

Growing up, Sir Tim was interested in trains and had a model railway in his bedroom. He recall:

I made some electronic gadgets to control the trains. Then I ended up getting more interested in
electronics than trains. Later on, when I was in college I made a computer out of an old
television set.

After graduating from Oxford University, Berners-Lee became a software engineer at CERN, the
large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists come from all over the
world to use its accelerators, but Sir Tim noticed that they were having difficulty sharing
information.

In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to
different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each
computer. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee,Tim
says.

Tim thought he saw a way to solve this problem one that he could see could also have much
broader applications. Already, millions of computers were being connected together through the
fast-developing internet and Berners-Lee realized they could share information by exploiting an
emerging technology called hypertext.

In March 1989, Tim laid out his vision for what would become the web in a document called
Information Management: Proposal. Believe it or not, Tims initial proposal was not
immediately accepted. In fact, his boss at the time, Mike Sendall, noted the words Vague but
exciting on the cover. The web was never an official CERN project, but Mike managed to give
Tim time to work on it in September 1990. He began work using a NeXT computer, one of Steve
Jobs early products.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposal

By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the
foundation of todays web (and which you may have seen appear on parts of your web browser):

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language. The markup (formatting) language for the web.
URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of address that is unique and used to identify
to each resource on the web. It is also commonly called a URL.
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Allows for the retrieval of linked resources from
across the web.
Tim also wrote the first web page editor/browser (WorldWideWeb.app) and the first web
server (httpd). By the end of 1990, the first web page was served on the open internet, and in
1991, people outside of CERN were invited to join this new web community. Tim moved from
CERN to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994 to found the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C), an international community devoted to developing open web standards.

The current trend in web development

The development of web has been exponential. Growth of web users has been
tremendous and instrumental in development of a totally new web industry.

Table 1.Growth of World Wide Web users (source: www.internetworldstats.com)

The growth in domain name registrations and website development has beenmultifold in last few
years. One of the reasons of this growth is the availability of webdevelopment tools and
platforms free of charge to aid in development. One of themost common example is the LAMP
(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack, which isusually distributed free of charge. Another
contributing factor towards growth ofwebsites has been the rise of easy to use WYSIWYG
(What You See Is What YouGet) web development software, most prominently Adobe
Dreamweaver, orMicrosoft Expression Studio. Within no time, virtually anyone can develop a
websiteusing such software even without any knowledge of HTML (Hyper Text Markup
Language).
Web is no longer about simple information provider in the form of text and images
only. Streaming audio and video content is common today. Media contents are
commonly used in Media blocks on websites for a variety of purposes. They make
websites look more vibrant, natural and functional. Flash is widely used for animated
graphic content of an absolutely different nature supported with dynamic content,
enriched with visual and sound effects. The only problem is its unfriendliness with
search engines.
The advancement in computer technology has resulted in larger computer displays
with higher resolution. Website layouts have accordingly increased its width and
height to accommodate larger displays. The layout has become simpler in order to
provide more comfort for reading and navigating the site. Centered orientation is
preferred over the previously popular left-site orientation of web pages. Web development has
moved to a new phase of internet communication. The mostpopular trend of communication on
the internet seems to be social networking sites. Facebook and Twitter are two of the most
popular social networking sites used toconnect with people.
Web Content Management Systems are also widely popular to manage vast range of
contents. Many of them are freely available like Joomla and Wordpress, with
flexibility of molding the site as per type of content.The next generation of web development
tools uses the strong growth in LAMP, JavaPlatform and Microsoft .NET technologies to
provide the web as a way to runapplications online. Web developers now help to deliver
applications as web serviceswhich were traditionally only available as applications on a desk
based computer. As the development of web advanced to a new level, the concept of web quality
alsochanged to an extent with certain new factors emerging as its defining criteria.

Conclusion
In conclusion many web designers have done publication about online showroom as a more
convenient way and an urgent requirement and a lot of research has been carried out though
implementation is still insufficient.
However, according to the literature available. There are numerous benefits that occurs from this
online showroom site. This includes free and quick viewing of cars anywhere and anytime. In
order to attracts customers and buyers attention Toyota Kenya need to put in place a online
showroom site website.

The proposed website

There is high demand for Online showroom website will help to avoid more expenses and to
remain more competitive through giving detailed information about that particular products.
 CHAPTER THREE: SYSTEM ANALYSIS

Introduction
This chapter covers the analysis of the different car website. The website to be created tends to
ease the access of different new cars worldwide. Before the analysis could be done, somedata
had to collected in order to investigate whether the website would be viable to this different car
manufactures .This involved some car dealers and mainly the public viewers.

Waterfall Model
For the development of this system, the waterfall model is going to be implemented. Using this
methodology, discrete sequential development stages are utilised, and one stage is completed
before the next stage of the development process is assumed.

Table 2. Waterfall Model

System analysis
This is to determine how the different car manufactures companies carrier out their day to day
publication of their new products especially through the internet and how their customers get
access to this products online

Summarized description on how the current cars get to public.

The car buyers access each individual car from each individual car manufactures website. Others
also get updates from their friends about the new cars while others only get to know after a new
invention has been made.

Technical and functional requirements of the proposed online system

Hardware requirements
In order for this system to be able to meet its functions, the following hardware requirements are
necessary.

Computer and its peripherals like keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc.

Computer specifications Pentium 4, 256MB RAM, 1.8GHz, 30GB Hard Disk, USB
Port for Flash Disk.
InternetAccess.

Software requirements
The software requirements that should enhance the proper functioning of this system are:

a. Operating system Windows XP, Windows 2000 professional.

b. Web browser Mozilla fire fox, Internet explorer, Safari, etc.

Usability Requirements
a. The system shall have interfaces that are easy to understand and use for the users.
b. Similar form screen displays shall be used in the user interface design.
c. Efficient design with few graphics and animations on the interfaces to avoid user
distraction from the core work.
Security Requirements
The system shall handle security issues in the following manner:
a) In order for the user to get access to the system, a unique username and password shall
have to be provided and authenticated by the system.
b) There are also user access levels. Different users have different access levels. For
Instance, a user has different privileges from an administrator. In this system, the
Administrator has the most supreme features over the others.

Operational Requirements

System Users
i. System Administrator, (will be responsible for uploading the new cars and other
products in the site and maintaining the site.)
ii. The Users (These will include the buyers, institutions, among others that will access the
site to view the new products.)

Functional Requirements
The system should provide the following functional services:
a) The system should allow its users to login into the system in order to access the new
products online.
b) System administrators shall be able to log into the system to upload the pictures of new
cars and prices obtained from the respective car manufactures.
c) Users will be able to download or print the picturesthat they desire with a click of the
mouse.

Non-Functional Requirements
The system should have the following performance requirements:

1. User friendly interface - The interface should be intuitive and easy to understand
so anyone can use it. To check this, constant testing with the user will be done.
2. Speed The speed of this application system will entirely depend on the type of
computer processing speed being used and the amount of bandwidth the users will be
connected to from their Internet service providers.
 3. Security Using the system shall require the user to submit a username and
password for authentication purposes. The system shall ensure that no user is able to
perform any of the functions without logging in into the system.
4. Availability
5. reliability

Choice of Development Environment

- Adobe Dreamweaver this will be used for writing the code to run the system
- Adobe Photoshop this will be used to edit and customize any pictures that will be used
to develop the system.
- MYSQL this will be used to develop the database used to store information for the
system.
- PHP this will be used to create the server side scripting of system that will be
responsible for connecting the system to the database.
- HTML this will be used to create the front end of the system, where the user will
interact with the system.
- JAVASCRIPT and JQUERY this will be used to enhance the user friendliness of the
system.

Data collection tools

In order to gather adequate and reliable data that would enhance development of the new system,
the following two data collecting techniques were used.

Questionnaire
Formulation of some the questions, which were open and closed questions was key to finding out
user requirements. This would help during developing of the website so as to cater for everything
required in the website.
No. Question Answer
1 1. What challenges to you get when First it consumes a lot time moving the
moving far to a specific dealer car.
location to be viewed?
2 How fast does it take you to get I only get the information after the car
information if or not a new car is in the has been bought by someone else.
market?
3 1. How much does is cost you to buy It cost a lot since I have to move to
a car inclusive and exclusive of the that cars location.
transport used?

Table 3. Questionnaire

Internet research
A research was done concerning different car manufacturers and dealers website to seek out how
they public ate their new cars to the market. This was done to figure out what had been left out in
their website to be added to the proposed website to meet the users requirements.

http://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web

http://www.internethalloffame.org/brief-history-internet

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm