Journal of Information Systems Education, Vol. 18(4)
409
An eCommerce Development Case: Your Company’s
eCommerce Web Site
Robert M. Ballenger
Department of Business Administration
Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, VA 24450
ballengerb@wlu.edu
ABSTRACT
This case provides a real-world semester long project-oriented case study for students enrolled in an electronic commerce course
that has a significant development component. The case provides the technical framework in the form of functional requirements
for students to design and build a fully functional transaction processing e-commerce Web site over the course of a semester
based on the company, products and/or services, content, and graphic images they choose. The case is divided into three
assignments. The first assignment is a basic e-commerce Web site that emphasizes site layout, navigation, text formatting,
inserting graphics, and the content necessary to market products and services online. Additional complexity is added in the
second assignment, an enhanced e-commerce Web site. In this assignment students will create their own graphics images, menus,
and image maps, use JavaScript to create image rollovers and image swaps, dynamically generate Web pages based on the
contents of a database, and use a form to send data to an email address. The third assignment is a full-fledged transaction
processing e-commerce Web site with a virtual shopping cart and checkout processing procedures. The case can to be used in a
course where the students have little or no prior programming or relational database experience. The case was written so that the
creation of the student’s e-commerce Web site is not dependent upon the student’s e-commerce development software, graphics
tool set, Web server, Web programming environment, or relational database management system. Teaching notes containing
suggested instructions, possible development environments, Web server configurations