A one-stop multimedia ecommerce website for marketing Ugandan art and crafts

Abstract

This study was about creating an e-commerce website with multimedia capabilities to market handicrafts made by Ugandans on the international market. There are too many handicraft artists in Uganda, whose ability has been limited by the small market. Some of these artists and vendors do not even have physical premises from which to sell their products, therefore they keep moving allover the city looking for places where they can sell their products like around the City Square, YMCA in Wandegeya. Another problem faced by the vendors is lack of exposure to the international market. If they get exposed to it, they will be able to increase their sales and improve their standards of living. To design this website, we have used Macromedia Dreamweaver for the user interface. The product catalog and the shopping cart have been designed in PHP. The multimedia effects in the site were designed using Adobe Premium and macromedia flash. The result of this study is a fully functional website with multimedia effects. This website has a product catalog from which customers can select the products they want and add them to a shopping cart. The shopping cart will then compute the total cost for the products the customer has purchased. Pre-eminently, the website www.artuganda.com is integrated with the user friendly flash effects, sounds, movies and/or electronic picture dynamics, a well-thought out idea that will interactively embrace the Business-to-Consumer concept of E-commerce, create leverage by bridging the gap between the handicrafts made in Uganda and for other artists allover the world, enhance their online market, expose Ugandan handicrafts on the international market as well as be attractive, informative, transactional and interactive.