Putting Toowoomba First Community Based Portal

Professor David Ross
Professor of Flexible Delivery
CEO Indelta Pty Ltd

Introduction

My presentation will involve a discussion and demonstration of a community based portal. The discussion will outline the concept from original design, project team members, project ownership as well as the design development production and implementation of the portal. The presentation and demonstration will focus on community based strategies as well as the technical infrastructure for the portal. The topic will be broken into requirements for the target audience, interactivity and communication requirements, security and content management access, data storage, database development, marketing and an e-commerce incubator.

Portal Design Features

To develop a web-based community portal for the city of Toowoomba, which is relevant to the local residents and businesses in the city and the surrounding region, community groups, tourists and the community in general. The portal is a database and ASP driven website containing information on the city - news, events, weather, discussion forum and links to a business index, e - learning and online shopping.

• To provide a Free Interaction Facility between the community members of the city of Toowoomba.
• To provide Information on the city of Toowoomba, such as Weather, tourist information if any.
• To provide a forum for the community of Toowoomba, to interact with each other.
• To provide an event calendar for the community of Toowoomba, to know the events taking place in the city of Toowoomba.
• To provide news on the web site for the people in general and the community and tourists of Toowoomba.
• To provide classifieds on the web site for the community of Toowoomba.
• To provide business links on the web site database system
• To provide shopping mall links on the web site. Full e-commerce solutions.
• To provide online learning links on the web site. Full e-learning management system.

The community wish is to exploit the Internet as a medium to extend its reach into the marketplace, to provide range of services and information to tourists and the community of Toowoomba and its surrounding region.

The target audience for the web site includes the following

General Visitors.
Tourists to the city of Toowoomba.
People of the city of Toowoomba.
Business houses of the city of Toowoomba.
Training and Education Providers - Universities, TAFE, Private Providers
Merchants / Customers

The portal is an important window for Toowoomba and additionally the site aims to directly support the above business goals by:

• Attracting people and giving them clear and accurate information about the city of Toowoomba.
• Keeping people informed of developments in the city of Toowoomba.
• Giving the people of Toowoomba a sense of ownership of the site - that it is their site, which will facilitate their career and professional goals by joining the Online Learning System.
• Keeping visitors within the site and making them to return to the site regularly through attractive graphics, intuitive, efficient and accessible navigation
• Being accessible to the audience as required
• Giving appropriate information to the people and the community of Toowoomba on the events that are going to undertake in the city of Toowoomba.
• Providing a forum to interact with each other making it a Platform Facilitating better management and governance.
• Providing a shopping mall for the community and the people to carry out online shopping services.
• Providing classifieds for the community and the people to find out services that are available in the city of Toowoomba.
• Providing business index information on the site for the users to find their choice of services.

Proposed functions

The project scope is described in terms of the functionality or the type of information. The home page typically contains:

Title and Logo "Put Toowoomba First"
Welcome statement: "Welcome to the Toowoomba portal."
About Toowoomba
News
Weather
Events Calendar
Community Forum
Classifieds
Business Index
Shopping Mall

About Toowoomba

Text about Toowoomba and Location maps

News

The news section has a Database driven list of news articles and each article contains:

Published date
Title
Text with short description

The portal does

• Facilitate uploading of the latest news into the database by the web master, which will be reflected on the pages relevant to the news
• The headlines are displayed as hyper link with published date title and short description on a news page and the detailed news are displayed on another page.
• By clicking on the news headlines on the news page the detailed news page is displayed.

Weather

The Weather section contains a Database driven weather information as listed below with appropriate icons to navigate to the detailed pages:

Today:
Icon for each weather type, short description with temperature.

Forecast:
Info for next three days.
Icon for each weather type, short description with temperature

The Today page:
Icon for each weather type, short description, detailed information such as temperature, Rainfall statistics, Humidity level etc. are displayed

Forecast page:
Date and time wise weather details are displayed.
Icon for each weather type, short description, detailed information such as temperature, Rainfall statistics, Humidity level etc. are displayed

Events

The Events section contains a Database driven Events information as listed below:

Database driven calendar events
Monthly calendar format
Select year, month or date
Select a place
Date and time wise display of events list

Link to full event details:

Title of event
Description
Date, time and place

This section is used to list forthcoming events. The following features are incorporated in this section:

Events Calendar
Drop down list boxes provided to select year, month, place.
A graphical representation of a calendar is displayed for the selected year and month.
Selecting a date, displays the list of events for that week showing the events for the selected date in a noticeable color. Completed events are grayed out or shown in red color and the forthcoming events are shown in green color

• A button is provided to display list of events for the selected month
• A search facility to search the events database using the date, time, place or event title as keys
• Event list is displayed as hypertext
• Click on the hyper text leads to a detailed page showing full details of the selected event
• How to list an Event in the Toowoomba Calendar

The web site provides online form for registering an Event in the Toowoomba Calendar. The online form provides facilities to capture and validate required information about the event

Community Forums

• A list of Forums is maintained with respect to the subject, the users may join various forums on variety of subjects.
• Users are allowed to create a new user-id and a password. An e-mail address would be required to send the password to the user.
• Once the user joins a forum, the user will be able to see the messages posted to the user and answer them. The user may also receive mails from the other members on that particular subject.
• Users may be able to unsubscribe from the forum by just sending an email to that particular subject forum.
• Search facility is provided to search a specific forum

Classifieds

• All visitors are provided with access to the Ads.
• A search facility is also provided.
• The categories and sub categories list is provided as hyper links
• By selecting a particular category (click) the Ads for that category are displayed on a separate page
• With every Ad a button is provided to e-mail a friend regarding the Ad.
• Members are provided with templates to upload the classifieds details to the database

Business Index

Links to Buy Toowoomba site

Shopping Mall

Links to Buy Toowoomba site

Online Learning

Links to Online delivery platform of Indelta

Rationale for the Toowoomba Portal

Why the Toowoomba City Council and the Toowoomba Chamber of Commerce had a need for the Put Toowoomba First concept.

• In excess of $1 billion leaves Toowoomba each year
• Toowoomba businesses miss out on $60 million a year in retail sales alone
• Darling Downs/South West industries, businesses and government services spend more than $1 billion a year outside the region.

$1 billion a year is potentially up-for-grabs

• Just a 10% share of that pie=
• A $100 million boost to our region's economy each year
• Which would mean a serious boost to
• Business Growth
• Job Creation
• Expanded Community Services and Facilities

How can we snare a bigger slice

• Business matching - Linking Toowoomba suppliers with users and identifying supply opportunities
• Education - Educate businesses, consumers and children to the value and ramifications of buying Toowoomba first
• Image Building - creating a consumer perception that Toowoomba businesses are vibrant and competitive. Enhancing resident's pride in Toowoomba
• Superior Performance - Advancing the skills and performance of Toowoomba business managers and staff to a level that surpasses that of external competitors.
• Incentives - Give customers extra incentives darn good reasons why they would want to buy locally, more often.

Putting Toowoomba First is a long term Strategy

• That will change and grow to meet market needs
• The education components are aimed at getting long term results
• Education kits to be sent to schools to promote a buy local ethic to the buyers of the future
• Business will be offered low cost training
• A bill board promoting our message will be placed at the bottom of the range
• Long term media campaigns will re-education consumers and business persons to put Toowoomba first
• Allow Putting Toowoomba First members to browse for local business opportunities
• Provide an opportunity for business to list requirements and to seek responses from local suppliers
• Provide feedback on supply and demand for goods and services

There will now be a full demonstration of the portal

Copyright

David Ross, © 2001. The author assigns to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web.

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