Report 3 Group Members: Romina Liu, Lucy Liu E-mail address: lianliu999@ hotmail.com              lucyliu99@hotmail.com Company Name: The best life Inc.Real estate)   · http://www.oocities.org/thebestlife2001 · Executive summary:     This week, we found a web site that helps us to create the homepage of our company, The Best Life Inc.Since we are considering how to make our websites be more attractive to get more customers to buy the houses which are on listing, some interesting pages have been developed to catch online customers' eyes: "School Information", which is link to some interesting and helpful school information web sites of most of the different cities in Toronto area, "Community information", in this informative page, customers could find as much information as possible to meet their needs. "About real estate", this page is about today's real estate industrial concepts, customers could ask questions by emailing us.       The Chinese pages have also been developed, we have already got much information which related to the above pages, and also much useful Chinese real estate related information and pages have been linked to our Chinese pages. · Budget: in this week, we haven't spent any money yet, because we don't need to buy a domain name, our web sites are posted as a member's page of www.oocities.org · Scope of the Project.                   On behalf of making the most benefit of our The Best Life, first of all, we         have to have a unique and interesting web site, let customer know us well, on specific fields carefully. Our target market segment is Chinese customer in Toronto area; on the other hand we have to take care of other customers who are from the different background. Because it is a multicultural society, we have to considering something carefully · Evaluation of IT Systems:               From the point of view of security, an IT system is designed to meet the requirements of a specific group of end-users. It has a real world environment, which can be defined and observed in every detail; in particular the characteristics and requirements of its end-users will be known, and the threats to its security are real threats, which can be determined. A product or a service must be suitable for incorporation in many systems; the product designer can only make general assumptions about the operational environment of a system of which it may become a component. It is up to the person buying the product and constructing the system to make sure that these assumptions are consistent with the actual environment of the system.                However, Today's IT safety System is not satisfied in this high technology industry. It is not safe enough for users and customers who are considering buying products online. For example, because the afraid of Master cards and Visa cards' numbers are stolen, customers will be hasten to enter their IP number into to a computer whenever they are willing to buy products online. However, it will be a block to today's growing electronic commerce. ·     Environment effecting this company and their online solution: 1) Competitive Environment We have done lots of researching about our competitors' web sites. Without doubt, they are all professionals' web sites, the competitive is very strong. After analyze those web sites, we got some good ideas to develop our web pages. However, something interesting we discovered is most of the online real estate companies in Toronto area are using one language: English. Our company, The Best Life Inc. is a bilingual company, we have applied Chinese language to our web sites on behalf of Chinese customers in Toronto areas, as the matter of fact, we develop our target market in Chinese community, but we have to take care of this multicultural society. 2) Economic Environment:  According to  a survey, housing starts 5% in October activity in  Ontario. Most of the strength in October  reflected a 15% rise in multiple-family initiatives. However, single-family starts continue to power the expansion with activity up 6% year-to-date from last year. With markets very tight, commercial and industrial building permits are trending higher and were up 12.5% in the first three quarters of 2000. 3) Technological Environment: So far, we have built our web sites, but not completed yet, some techniques problems are still waiting to get solved. For example, we are using Page Builder of www.oocities.org to build our web sites, after we did the link to our email address, it didn't work, and we were told that the server in www.oocities.org doesn't support our email account. We have to solve this problem as soon as possible. 4) Legal/Political Environment: Since we have to consider carefully about the legal environment, we avoid to just copy other web sites stuff, however, we have collected many useful and interesting pictures, and images, and we design our web sites by ourselves. 5) Sociocultural Environment: The languages so far we have applied to our web sites are English and Chinese. In our English version, we have to familiar with today's Canadians culture, we have to realize their life styles, and their standard of buying houses, what they actually like their houses look like and what price usually they would like to pay for a house. On the other hand, we have to consider baby bombers and generation Xers needs. On the our Chinese web sites, we have to pay attention to Chinese people's habit and culture, we have to consider the traditional Chinese customers and Model western style Chinese people's needs for their houses. However, we have to pay attention to both western and oriental cultures and try our best to avoid any wording that make people unhappy with us. · Web hosting solutions: Page Builder program in www.oocities.org  is a basic page builder, we     have to familiar with its instruction when we build up our web pages. We have found a way to solve the Chinese pages' problems. In fact, computer can't read Chinese characters without a communicator like NJStar. We downloaded a software named NJ Chinese word processor , then we input Chinese characters by typing Pinyin to this processor as a Chinese GB5 simplified format , and those characters we typed have to be copy and pasted to a page of the Page Builder. More and more techniques are waiting for us to solve over, like creating a searching engine into our web sites, making a counter ect. · Domain Name consideration: The Best Life doesn't need to buy a domain name, because we are a member of www.oocities.org. We can create our own web sites in Geocities.