The aim of the Grosvenor Project is to develop a unique ‘Self Service e-Store’ facility for a
website building platform. The current platform is an Internet-based website design and
hosting service, targeted at micro and small businesses which have no capability and
experience of producing websites (within the UK, 60% of SMEs do not have a website). The
next stage is to make it easy to create websites of significantly increased sophistication
through integration with best-of-breed third party web-based services e.g. eCommerce,
eMarketing, mobile payments, etc. The proposed approach is to create a thriving e-Store with
a wide range of applications and widgets to provide the integrations between the third party
services and the websites developed and deployed using the platform. Therefore, companies
who traditionally eschew the use of the web as a trading opportunity, or who cannot afford the
creation of a website to provide new revenue streams, can easily and quickly create and
deploy such a website without requiring any detailed technical expertise over and above using
a web browser to manipulate drag-and-drop based design templates.
The key objectives are to:
a) identify the best approach for creating, managing and using an e-Store that contains
applications and widgets to be used to create innovative websites based upon the builder
platform;
b) define and demonstrate the security framework to underpin the e-Store to ensure that
malicious applications and widgets cannot cause broader service failure or permit data
integrity and availability violations;
c) demonstrate the capabilities of the new software development kit to enable the creation of
the applications and widgets that will enable simple integration with a broad range of third
party services; and
d) identify the most effective way to annotate and manage the availability of the new
applications and widgets to ensure they can be quickly and effectively used by a non-technical
website designer.