Analyzing Website Development: Social, Ethical, Legal, Security

Introduction

The proposed artefact project involving the development of an online-business website requires strategic analysis of the project’s social, ethical, legal, and security aspects, including aspects related to business dissertation help. Analysis of these four important areas is crucial to ensuring that the entire project achieves its objective in the long run. Analysis of each of these areas is also essential in ensuring that the entire project falls within the mandatory social and legal environments required of any successful project proposal. The outcome of the assessment will provide guidelines on the essence of ensuring that the website is customized accordingly and that it is strategically positioned for the identified market. The necessitated social, ethical, legal, and security assessment of the artefact project will also provide frameworks that will guide the entire project’s implementation and will form part of the structural guidelines of running the project.

Social Impact Assessment

Since the project focuses on creating a website for an online-based restaurant, it directly touches various social aspects that should be comprehensively evaluated and understood. The social aspect of this project touches on issues, such as ensuring that the website is optimized for reaching out to the masses in terms of being user-friendly. As previously identified in the search engine optimization (SEO) assessment, important details relating to the website’s ability to attract the end-user should be considered and incorporated in the web design. The website design perspectives will, in this regard, ensure that the esteemed customers find it easy and inviting to visit the site and obtain crucial information, such as the restaurant’s operating hours, location, contact details, and menu among other essential aspects of the day-to-day operations of the online restaurant.

Additional details should be incorporated in the website to make it as socially inviting to customers as possible, including the visualization of meals in terms of what diners will get once they order a particular item on the menu. This will require the website to incorporate professionally taken still photographs that give the audience a true reflection of how the restaurant looks like and what the food items ordered will be upon preparation. The essence of still photography on the website, in this regard, cannot be overemphasized. According to Oliveria & Casais (2019), still photographs are important in helping to attract potential customers who have no previous experience of a given restaurant service (Oliveria & Casais, 2019). The user-generated photographs are important in helping convince potential customers of the value-added service they will get upon utilizing the restaurant's services.

Another social aspect that will be of significance when designing the website revolves around the use of previous customer reviews and ratings. When designing the web page, it is important to include, on the homepage, a dedicated panel from where customers can visualize the restaurant’s ratings as provided by previous customers. Integrating the website's review page with various reviewing platforms, such as Google Reviews, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Yelp, or even Foursquare, can be of substantial marketing boost to the restaurant business and its website. According to an assessment conducted by Lackermair et al. (2013), product and service reviews and ratings are substantially popular tools that help support buying decisions among new and doubting customers (Lackermair et al., 2013). These reviews also happened to be important in the business’s capacity to build trust and strong reputations in the online business sector. Displaying previous ratings is, therefore, an essential social aspect that helps new customers to directly or indirectly connect with previous customers in terms of sharing their experiences.

Ethical Issues to be Considered

Every business, including online businesses, exists within a given environment that is defined by ethical standards. It is the responsibility of the business’s founders to consider the ethical values that should be upheld before founding the business, as a way of honoring customers' rights. For the artefact project surrounding the building of a website for the online restaurant, it is important to understand the various ethical issues that affect online activities. One of the ethical challenges that should be contemplated revolves around cybercrime. Cybercrime is a major issue that is extensive, diverse, and concerns online-based businesses in various ways. According to Smith (2004), the broad concept of cybercrime and cyber terrorism does threaten to drive away customers and deprive them of the confidence required of them to trust businesses with an online presence (Smith 2004). Establishing and retaining this confidence is highly essential for the artefact project and requires the implementation of strong cybersecurity measures guaranteed to enforce customer privacy.

Being an online-based business with an orientation of service provision in the eatery sector, the online restaurant website may involve some form of customer-data collection to facilitate the personalization of customer service. The website may, for instance, involve the collection of personal user details, such as an individual's name, location, age, and gender, among other personal information. This personal data is highly essential in helping with the reservation of tables for customers in instances where advance booking is necessary. Additional information that may be required includes an individual's residential or business address in situations where the customer prefers to use the takeaway service after ordering online. Safeguarding this information again as potential theft is highly necessary for the business’s survival in the market and consequent avoidance of legal repercussions.

The last ethical issue that should be considered revolves around creating a strong business ethics framework and consequently communicating it to the public through the website. Being an online business implies that there may be much of a disconnect between the actual business and customers from a physical interaction perspective. This particularly applies to customers who may choose to order online for off-premise meal deliveries. It is ethically required of the business to guarantee customers that they will get value-added services once they order from the business's website. Valuing these and more ethical standards will help add to the business's reputation for good regard for its customers.

Legal Aspects and Considerations

The development of the online restaurant business website requires consideration of various significant legal aspects. Firstly, the business needs to be appropriately incorporated in accordance with the existing legal frameworks of establishing businesses. Every aspect of the Company Law and Corporate Governance Regulations should, in this regard, be followed to the later. For instance, the business should be duly registered with the government agency responsible, and a list of its directors filed for reference and registration purposes. Upon registration, pertinent information regarding the business should be displayed on the appropriate web page, primarily the About Us Page. Availing this information for the public referral is a requirement of the law and gives the business and identity in the online space. Additional information that should be displayed on the web page to give the business and identity include the company name, registered official address, and other contact information, such as email addresses.

The second crucial legal aspect that should be considered to ensure that the artefact project is duly completed revolves around compliance to contextual General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations. Being a website, it may be necessary, from a programming and web development point of view, for the website to use cookies to collect and store important data, such as location and other forms of cached data. As required within the GDPR regulations, it is important to provide the user with an opportunity to consent to the website's collection of such information. The failure to adhere to these regulatory requirements may expose the company behind the website to stiff penalties and fines whose magnitude depends on the scale of the breach. For instance, severe violations can attract a fine of up to 20 million euros or 4% of the company’s total turnover (Voigt & Bussche, 2017). This is in addition to the substantial damage of reputation that the business may suffer.

The website and the business behind it may also be required to create appropriate privacy policies that guarantee customers of the safety of personal information, as above outlined. In addition to this, the website should outline clear policies on copyright issues, particularly in cases where intellectual property rights are involved. Among important copywriting areas includes giving or denying web users the right to copy information from the website and stipulating the boundaries of the use of such information. The copyright may also bar competitor websites from utilizing any design perspective of the website, particularly since it contributes to the business’s brand identity in the market. Since the website may involve the outsourcing of web design services, it is also important to outline that every aspect of the web design is copyrighted to the business. This may be essential to prevent the web developers, upon selling the web to the business, from claiming intellectual property rights over any aspect of the website.

Security Aspects and Considerations

Security is a contemporary issue, particularly when it comes to online data and information. As pointed out above, it is highly essential to consider the various cyber threats that are prevalent in the online space. The artefact project touches on various security aspects that should be regarded during the web development and maintenance phases. Various website vulnerabilities, in this regard, should be considered. One of the key web vulnerability aspects revolves around SQL injection. SQL injection is a security vulnerability where attackers target injecting some programmable codes with the intent of accessing or corrupting data held within the database. If such an attack is successful, it may lead to a substantial loss of private data or even alteration of the functionality of the website, leading to unwanted web downtimes. Additional security aspects that should be considered during the web development phase of the artefact project include risks, such as cross-site scripting, where attackers target executing web scripts with the intent of hijacking legitimate user sessions to deface websites.

As a safeguarding measure on SQL injection attacks, it is important to consider a host of measures, including using a strong web application firewall to filter out malicious and suspicious web accesses. It may also help to use input validation functions, including MySQL's mysql_real_escape_string(), which serves to filter out suspicious and dangerous characters that may be passed on to the SQL query to infiltrate the database. In addition, it is highly essential to secure the website’s back-end and database from unmerited access. Using tools, such as Secure Shell Keys (SSH) to administer encrypted protocol during communications with servers, can also help increase web operational safety.

Since the artefact project revolves around a website that is frequently updated, perhaps on a daily basis, it is important to utilize safe and vetted open-source content management systems that facilitate quick and safe web editing. Secure open-source solutions such as Magento, HubSpot, Tiki Wiki, Joomla, WordPress, and ProcessWire, among others, can serve the purpose well. Additional web security measures that may be important in facilitating safe accessibility of web content include web encryption. Various aspects of web encryption, including data encryption and traffic encryption, are necessary to facilitate the safe exchange of information between the server and the client devices.

To ensure traffic encryption, the web developers may consider using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) that defines how information is formatted and transmitted over a Transport Layer Security. Database encryption by using algorithms to cipher text stored in the web database is also essential in the prevention of external database attacks. The last essential layer of security that should be incorporated in the restaurant website involves protection against Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks. DDoS attacks are primarily channeled towards targeted sites, such as e-commerce websites and businesses which rely on the internet to provide online services. This implies that the artefact project falls under this risk category and should be appropriately configured for DDoS protection. DDoS protection mechanisms, including outsourcing DDoS prevention to cloud-based solutions, may be an effective countermeasure.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the successful completion of the artefact project requires a comprehensive professionalism assessment touching on the above-outlined aspects. Understanding the social, ethical, legal, and security elements of the project ensures that the final online website created meets not only the business’s intended goals but also fulfills the industry-mandated regulatory requirements. Assessing the entire project alongside this framework will also safeguard the business and website against potential risks that may threaten its establishment.

Reference

Lackermair, G., Kailer, D. and Kanmaz, K., 2013. Importance of online product reviews from a consumer’s perspective. Advances in economics and business, 1(1), pp.1-5.

Oliveira, B. and Casais, B., 2019. The importance of user-generated photos in restaurant selection. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Technology.

Smith, A.D., 2004. Cybercriminal impacts on online business and consumer confidence. Online Information Review, 28(3), pp.224-234.

Voigt, P. and von dem Bussche, A., 2017. Enforcement and Fines Under the GDPR. In The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (pp. 201-217). Springer, Cham.

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