Last post was a break down of some of the more major portfolio sites that are out there. I admit that I haven't broken down some of the other major competitors, but I think we have enough competitor research, and I was noticing common trends with the ones that I had already researched.
I met with Jared Taylor so that he could go over the marking criteria for this E&E unit so that I could have a better understanding of what I need to do in order to pass this unit.
Doing the company breakdowns which were in effect a SWOT analyses (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats). I have never done a SWOT analysis before, so this was a new experience for me.
When I told Jared about the business idea that we are working on. Jared pointed out something that running two operations at the same time is both entrepreneurial and efficient as we are raising our capital primarily through this business. The businesses that we are running are merchandising and this portfolio website.
Merchandising business- sell t-shirts to fund the website. We won't be spending any of our own money because we will be doing a supply on demand operation.
When I told Jared about my idea of having a job page, or there being a section on the homepage for job advertisements, he said that Ravensbourne already has a jobs page, and with this portfolio site idea, it's a good idea, but if there is a paid membership then that's a bad idea because of several reasons:
Why should students have to pay for this kind of service when there are so many other portfolio sites out there that do the same service for free.
The second reason is that there are 1,744 students in the college, we need to consider how many of them have web building capabilities. Why would they pay to use our service? When they could make their own portfolio.
Jared also told me that the kinds of services that we were offering on the site, the college already do it. This was something that I wasn't really aware of. This shows that I had not been very thorough with my research, I have some good progress with external companies, but I foolishly forgot to check out the main, internal competitor- Ravensbourne itself.
There's already a jobs page, which I knew about, but not many people check the page out. My suspicion is that the main reason why is because it's on moodle, and nobody likes it. It's cluttered, not user friendly and there are too many links which leads to the user being overloaded. I think a survey needs to be launched as to why people don't like using Moodle and would they use our site as a way of seeing what jobs are out there if it was created.
Jared also said that we are limiting ourselves in terms of expansion, there are only 1,744 students in the college, and we have no guarantee of how many people will sign up to the website. We as a group thought that the best way to expand is to sell this site or service to other universities. That way reaching more customers.
We came to an agreement that this website will be funded entirely from the merchandise business that we are running at the same time as apposed to a paid membership and money from merchandising. We will also look at potential advertisers. Andy Kinnear had the idea of perhaps Autodesk liking to sponsor the website for advertising space.
One idea I had was to have a job page on the website where people like Lorna Hamilton upload jobs that they have found on to this site, instead of a page on moodle (college intranet) and on this page we have filters for the different types of jobs, location, and duration of this job.
This blog post is to show that myself and the rest of the group are aware of some of the weaknesses of this business.
The next step is to meet Lizzie Jackson (credit to Tara Dulake for arranging the meeting) with Tara Dulake and find out about the services that Ravensbourne offer. From this research we can see if we could come up with some kind of page that brings these services that Ravensbourne offer in to one location.
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