May, 2012

The biggest news of the month is our decision to move into supply and delivery of rare and specialized garden materials.
This has led to the formulation of three action plans to upgrade our website.

Our "Accessibility and Security Plan" can be seen on our About Us page.

Here we present our XML plan.

Why do we need XML?

Our business is expanding and so too is the Web. As we move into supply and delivery the content of our website will increase.

The population of websites is also increasing rapidly. Therefore we need to be seen and found within the crowd.

XML will let us be seen by all, as its strict and standardised syntax has universal browser support.

XML will make us easier to find, by opening our content, in particular our product and service inventory, to search engines.
This is important now, but will become essential when we progress to the Semantic Web.

How will it be implemented?

• new content, in particular the new "Products" page, will be coded with XML from the outset
• "Services" and "Contact" pages will be rewritten as a priority, as it is these data rich areas (including "Products"),
  that will be most affected,and benefit greatly, from the inclusion of XML
• database of cutomer and supplier details will be structured using XML

Advantages:

• customers can find us without knowing our name, as we can be found by what we do, what we sell, or where we are
• data such as our product inventory, prices, location and contact details can be more easily accessed as content is structured
• data is separated from design, thus can be easily adapted to other presentation formats such as mobile devices, thus increasing our marketing potential
• XML is not bound to a particular proprietory platform that may, over time, become incompatable with new devices. Data is therefore preserved
  through any amount of device or software upgrades without having to be rewritten.
• as XML becomes the industry standard, it will be easier to interact with the data and applications of our suppliers (Pelz-Sharpe, 2010)
• XML coding can be read by humans as well as machines, making modifications and additions easy

Disadvantages:

• insertion of code is long and laborious