Mid Sweden University

To make sure that customers keep coming back to a website, it is important for the pages to download fast and for customers to be able to use and understand the website. The objective of this project was to develop a tourist website. The project had further goals to do usability test and to test the load time of the pages. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), MySQL, Apache, JavaScript and CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) were used to developed and designed the website. Usability test was performed by allowing ten participants to evaluate the website and the result recorded. The website was uploaded to a free host service to get a web address and Gtmetrix tool used to analyse the performance of the web address. The result obtained was a functional website which sells books on African and Cameroon tourism, a website for authorized employees to add books, delete and view orders, reservations and feedback. For customers to make reservation, buy books and make payment using PayPal. The usability test result revealed that 90% of the participants agreed that the website was easy to use and they can easily get information, 80% agreed that they will frequently use the website while 20% agreed that it was difficult for them to keep track of where they were on the site. The result of the page load time showed that the contact page loaded in 1. 23 seconds, the home, reservation and registration pages loaded in 1.17 seconds while activity and shop pages loaded in 1.64 seconds and 2.44 seconds respectively. In conclusion, the page loaded fast, users understood the purpose of the site and they could easily navigate and use the website. Hence the task of developing a website, perform usability test and test the load time of the pages was achieved.