探讨按网页标准进行商务网站开发

网页标准是目前网页设计应遵循的事实上的行业标准。笔者结合行业实际和教学经验,指出Web行业和教育界对网页标准的一些不当的理解和使用,以及采取Web标准进行商务网站设计的要点。     

Positioning strategies for branding services in an emerging economy

ABSTRACT

The concept paper adopts a positioning type for the purpose of branding services in a transitioning economy. The consumer-based typology is deemed appropriate and relevant as it represents consumer expectations, reflecting the paper’s key argument that consumer-based positioning strategies are appropriate for branding purposes. Consequently, the paper adopts a positioning type for illustrative purpose. The three positioning strategies adopted were—‘service reliability’, ‘social responsibility’, and ‘branding’ apply to the Ghanaian context. The ‘service reliability’ strategy has a ‘universal’ appeal and is the most prevalent in application. The ‘social responsibility’ to a large extent reflects the caring and community-based nature of the Ghanaian society, whilst the ‘branding’ strategy appears more applicable to international than local firms. The paper contributes to theoretical knowledge in its key assertion that the application of consumer-based positioning strategies for branding is appropriate and beneficial. Practically, the derived propositions will guide the manager in decision making on branding.     

Developing e-service quality scales: A literature review

This study reviews the literature on e-service quality (e-SQ), with an emphasis on the methodological issues involved in developing measurement scales and issues related to the dimensionality of the e-SQ construct. We selected numerous studies on e-SQ from well-known databases and subjected them to a thorough content analysis. The review shows that dimensions of e-service quality tend to be contingent on the service industry. Despite the common dimensions often used in evaluating e-SQ, regardless of the type of service on the internet (‘reliability/fulfilment’, ‘responsiveness’, ‘web design’, ‘ease of use/usability’, ‘privacy/security’, and ‘information quality/benefit’), other dimensions are specific to e-service contexts. The study also identifies several conceptual and methodological limitations associated with developing e-SQ measurement such as the lack of a rigorous validation process, the problematic sample size and composition, the focus on functional aspects, and the use of a data-driven approach. This is the first study to undertake an extensive literature review of research on the development of e-SQ scales. The findings should be valuable to academics and practitioners alike.     

Quality function deployment in failure recovery and prevention

This paper presents a strategic model for proactively recovering and preventing service failures; it employs an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to measure the severity of failure categories and ultimately employs quality function deployment (QFD) to identify the execution order of proactive recovery and prevention strategies. Questionnaires on AHP and QFD were used to collect data. The results show that the three most important strategies, ‘Educational training of employees,’ ‘Managerial level professional expertise and leadership,’ and ‘Staff appraisal, reward, and punishment systems,’ are within the purview of human resources management. Human resource management plays a key role in service failure and recovery management. For individual failure categories, business managers can select those that are most severe and execute proactive recovery and failure prevention strategies. We propose a methodology for designing service recovery systems and that addresses the gap in academic research on proactive recovery and service failure prevention.     

Successes and failures of the mirroring principle: the case of angling and beauty websites

This article examines whether industries with differing target markets in terms of their customers’ gender reflect the design preferences of their target markets in line with the mirroring principle. An analysis was conducted of websites of industries concentrated alternatively on male and female consumers, namely the angling and beauty salon industries. In each case, a random selection of 60 angling and beauty websites were rated using rating characteristics identified as typical of the male and female web‐design production aesthetic. The fact that each gender has a marked preference for the production aesthetic of its own gender, and that the websites of industries focused on, alternatively, male and female consumers, are produced using a predominantly male design production aesthetic, shows the current failure in certain industries to deliver the empathy or mirroring principle. The male domination of the information technology and web‐design industries, together with the earlier rooting of research on web aesthetics in the universalist, as against the interactionist perspective, are adduced as possible factors in this failure. This failure, if representative of other industries, could be leading to the suboptimal use of web design for markets not dominated by men, and may be one of the factors leading women to be less frequent users of the web than men.     

Modeling e-Negotiation Processes for a Service Oriented Architecture

Most of today's e-marketplaces support a single negotiation protocol. The protocol is usually built into the e-marketplace infrastructure, therefore if a new one is introduced then a time consuming and complex process of implementing it takes place. Moreover, participants in the e-marketplace need to adapt their interfaces to the new protocol, especially if they use automated tools to interact with the e-marketplace. This paper reports on a model-driven approach and a framework for rapid and user-friendly development of configurable service oriented e-negotiation systems. We believe that a formal specification of negotiation protocols and their separation from the market infrastructure that implements them is a step towards configurable e-negotiation systems. The protocols are graphically designed for the e-marketplace then mapped into web service orchestrations. Participants use automated negotiation systems to interact with the e-marketplace. These systems are generated based on the negotiation protocol implemented on the e-marketplace. A declarative language is used to specify negotiation strategies and tactics. We propose an algorithm to map Statechart models of negotiation protocols into web service orchestrations and we report on the current implementation of our framework.     

Give or Take on the Internet: An Examinationof the Disclosure Practices of Insurance Firm Web Innovators

Theories of corporate social responsibility suggest that there ought to be a balance between what business takes from society and what it gives back in return. Recently, the practice literature within the insurance industry has been heavily pushing for the development of the Internet as a tool for commerce while virtually ignoring the role it could play in terms of information disclosure to stakeholders. This study examines whether insurance firms themselves reflect this emphasis, or whether companies that are industry leaders with respect to web innovation for product marketing are also leaders in using the web for information disclosure. A study of the web pages for 40 property and casualty firms drawn from Franzis (2000), shows that financial disclosure for the overall sample is at best moderate. The disclosure of social responsibility information on these web pages is quite low, on average. Further, and importantly from a social balance perspective, the web innovators in terms of product marketing are not industry leaders in terms of information disclosure.     

When Suits Meet Roots: The Antecedents and Consequences of Community Engagement Strategy

Understanding firms’ interfaces with the community has become a familiar strategic concern for both firms and non-profit organizations. However, it is still not clear when different community engagement strategies are appropriate or how such strategies might benefit the firm and community. In this review, we examine when, how and why firms benefit from community engagement strategies through a systematic review of over 200 academic and practitioner knowledge sources on the antecedents and consequences of community engagement strategy. We analytically describe evidence on the rise of the community engagement strategy literature over time, its geographical spread and methodological evolution. A foundational concept underlying many studies is the ‘continuum of community engagement’. We build on this continuum to develop a typology of three engagement strategies: transactional, transitional and transformational engagement. By identifying the antecedents and outcomes of the three strategies, we find that the payoffs from engagement are largely longer-term enhanced firm legitimacy, rather than immediate cost–benefit improvements. We use our systematic review to draw implications for future research and managerial practice.     

Waiting for service: modelling the effectiveness of service interventions

Most service businesses tend to experience unwelcome delays in service delivery that often generate strong negative impacts from customers. In response, managers develop and implement service intervention strategies, such as providing length and reason of a delay, both of which have been reported to have positive impacts on customers. However, the results from studies investigating such interventions are mixed. Accordingly, it is hypothesised that these effects may be contingent upon certain situations. This research project has investigated the wait situation using an experimental design. A 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design was first created using a restaurant scenario for the stimulus material and an online web site was used to collect data from 130 respondents. Our findings indicate a significant moderating effect of level of service use and degree of goal attractiveness on the effectiveness of providing duration and cause information. More importantly, we found that under certain conditions a service intervention may be counterproductive to the intended strategy. This finding suggests that managers need to be wary of developing and executing expensive service recovery strategies without due regard to the customer segment being targeted.     

A comprehensive study of worldwide selfie-related accidental mortality: a growing problem of the modern society

Since Oxford dictionary has described ‘Selfie’, selfie deaths have received a fair amount of coverage but the extent of the problem and the data behind it have not been appropriately explored. The aim of our study is to obtain epidemiological characteristics of selfie-related mortality worldwide with the objective of providing an insight to ‘Why selfie’, ‘Why risky’, ‘Psychological basis’ and ‘measures of control.’ Despite thousands of web pages, very few scientific articles are available in medical journals. So, we went online via Google search engine compiling every reported instance after confirming it and verifying the information in Wikipedia. Non-fatal injuries and non-selfie type of photography-related deaths were excluded from the study. From 2014 to mid-2016, 75 people have died while attempting selfie in 52 incidents worldwide. Mean age of the victims was 23.3 and 82% were male. India is the most affected country and Russia and US being second. Fall from height, drowning and rail accidents are the top three modes of death. Large-scale use of cell phone worldwide and underlying risk in selfie behaviour seems the culprit. Inability to compare selfie with non-selfie photography due to lack of data is definitely a limitation. Worldwide initiatives are being taken like ‘NO SELFIE ZONES’ but still a multifactorial approach is required before it gets too late.     

Compete in Price or Service?—A Study of Personalized Pricing and Money Back Guarantees

Retailers use both pricing and service strategies to respond to intensified competition. Here we develop a duopoly model to investigate the impact of the increasingly popular personalized pricing strategy (PPS) and the widely used Money Back Guarantee (MBG) customer returns policy. We consider two retailers who differ in customer satisfaction rates. Each retailer chooses a pricing strategy, PPS or uniform pricing, and a product return strategy, MBG or ‘no returns.’ We show that both PPS and MBG are dominant strategies, but their impact on retailers’ prices and profits are different; while PPS intensifies price competition and may lead to a prisoner’s dilemma in which both retailers may lose profit, MBG mitigates price competition and may result in a Pareto improvement in both retailers’ profits. Both PPS and MBG increase the size of the overall market, but not the total duopoly profit. The total customer surplus and social welfare may increase under either strategy. In addition, we obtain some interesting observations as to how our results may change if the product quality/customer satisfaction rate is endogenously chosen in the duopoly. Some of our findings are in contrast to related results reported in the literature.     

Interactivity in Web Sites of Medical Support Organizations in Finland

Abstract

Traditionally, the activities of medical support organizations are largely based on face-to-face meetings and events as well as telephone services. The Internet has brought new possibilities for communicating both with members and between members. This study analyzes the web pages of seventeen support organizations and examines the views of the communicators of the organizations on the philosophy of constructing web sites. The web pages provide a wealth of information as well as many kinds of interactive services. There are two levels of interaction, one quasi-interactive and the other truly interactive. The communicators emphasize collaboration in the construction of web sites. They are aware of segmentation in their members (e.g., young and old) and of the challenges in using computer-based means of communication.     

Factors Influencing Web Customers’ Willingness to Engage in Online Shopping with an Internet Retailer

This study is an effort to identify and analyze the factors that could potentially influence web customers’ willingness to engage in online shopping with an Internet retailer. Using the primary data collected from a large sample of a web-based consumer survey, researchers developed a structural Equation model that embodied those factors that potentially influenced web customers’ willingness to engage in online shopping with an Internet retailer. Seven constructs were considered to study the effects of those factors on the web customers’ willingness to engage in online shopping with an Internet retailer, including quality of service, inertia to change, economic value, stress reduction, enjoyment in doing business, comfort level with website, and aesthetic appeal. The proposed model is largely supported and validated by several statistical measures and tests.     

Service-selecting approach based on domain-specified 'Quality of Service' model and its application in logistics

With the rapid growth of modern service economics and the popular adoption of web services, more and more service industries are beginning to deliver services with web service technology. One of the key issues is how the service consumer should search for services within the plentiful service repositories, and especially select a suitable and optimal service from candidates with similar features. However, most of the researches on service selection focus on the general criteria of web service, but ignore the domain-specified needs. This paper proposes a domain-specified quality of service model and an analytic hierarchy process-based service-selecting approach by integrating hierarchical clustering algorithms and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation methods. An application in logistics is given to validate the effectiveness of this approach.     

eCCIq: The quality of electronic customer-to-customer interaction

Electronic customer-to-customer interaction (eCCI) becomes crucial in innovative business models (e.g., Ebay, Facebook) that are either intentionally built on such eCCI occurring completely on purpose or for providers that are embedding web 2.0 and social media techniques in their service offering. To enable a more active application and purposeful management of eCCI, it is essential to conceptualize its quality (eCCIq) as a start. In doing so we identify seven factors that constitute the domain of eCCIq: ‘Content’, ‘Security’, ‘Hedonic’, ‘Quantity’, ‘Atmosphere’, ‘Convenience’ and ‘Social’. Construct development is based on existing literature on CCI and various closely-related constructs as well as on an empirical study assessing eCCIq in a qualitative and quantitative manner. Our results enable firms to more selectively influence and control eCCIq and provide the basis to conduct any further research on the impact of eCCI and its quality.     

网络旗帜广告的策划和设计

网络旗帜广告作为网络广告的主要形式,频繁出现在国内外各种网页上,但目前来看,网络旗帜广告正遭遇失效的窘境。必须从网络旗帜广告的现状入手,找出其准备工作和设计的基本点,进而分析如何进行网络旗帜广告的策划和设计,以提高网络旗帜广告的吸引力。     

Advanced information technology: transforming service innovation and design

This research explores the role of advanced information technologies at the ‘fuzzy’ front-end of service innovation and design. Service researchers have been exploring the application of technology to services for a while, however there has been little attention paid to the use of technology at the front-end of service innovation and design. Research suggests that advanced information technologies should be useful in research and development for services; but how this may occur has not been explored. Bringing together design thinking and the technology–organization–environment framework for technology adoption this research develops propositions for research to expose how technology can advance and transform service innovation and design. Theoretical and practical research questions are offered to guide inquiry in this emerging research space.     

Explicating the ‘like’ on Facebook brand pages: The effect of intensity of Facebook use,number of overall ‘likes’, and number of friends' ‘likes’ on consumers' brand outcomes

This study examined the relationship between the number of overall ‘likes’ and friends' ‘likes’ on Facebook brand pages in influencing consumers' brand attitude, brand trust, brand involvement, and purchase intention, drawing upon theoretical concepts including diffusion of innovations, social capital theory, strength of weak ties, sociometric versus perceptual popularity, and prior research in online impression formation. Results of a 2 × 2 experiment revealed significant main effects of number of overall ‘likes’ and friends' ‘likes’ on key dependent measures. A significant interaction effect was also found between overall ‘likes’ and friends' ‘likes’. Additionally, intensity of Facebook use also mediated the relationships between number of overall ‘likes’ and friends' ‘likes’ with brand attitude, brand trust, and purchase intention.     

Role of Shopping Values and Web Atmospherics in E-Satisfaction and Repurchase Intention

Expected to touch US$55 billion in 2016, the e-commerce market in India presents an unprecedented growth opportunity for retailers. Existing studies have identified factors influencing shoppers’ online behaviour pertaining to the developed economies. Hence, it becomes pertinent to validate these antecedents for the economies like India. The article addresses this gap by examining the role of shopping values and web atmospherics, on e-satisfaction of Indian shoppers. Using multiple regression analysis, it also examines the influence of e-satisfaction on repurchase intention. The findings suggest that effectiveness of information content has the most significant impact on e-satisfaction. Web entertainment, utilitarian values and web informativeness are the other influencing factors. Contrary to the earlier studies, this study didn’t find any influence of hedonic shopping values on shoppers’ satisfaction. Also, e-satisfaction was found to have a positive influence on repurchase intention of e-shoppers. The article suggests select strategies that can be adopted by e-retailers.     

Analysis of visual presentation of cultural dimensions: Culture demonstrated by pictures on homepages of universities in Pakistan

The recent prominence of culturally rich visuals for effective global communication and establishing brands of organizations cannot be denied. This inquest observed how Pakistan universities used their homepages to demonstrate culture through a content analysis of 1064 pictures from 100 top universities. The researcher tried to take a stance on visual presentation of cultural aspects by using Hofstede’s cultural dimension theory, and evaluated the impact of cultural elements in choosing pictures as part of web design and marketing strategy. Results indicated that faculty in groups doing academic and official activities were the predominant visual element, and websites mostly marketed faculty. Choice of pictures was positively correlated with Hofstede’s scores on power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance and indulgence, but a different trend was observed for masculinity and pragmatism. Findings suggest that institutions should ameliorate their web marketing according to cultural needs of local as well as international students, and further research is needed.