DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree MAGISTER TECHNOLOGIAE in INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY in the FACULTY OF BUSINESS INFORMATICS at the CAPE PENINSULA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY 2006 / Research has shown that most website developers first build a website and only later focus on the ‘searchability’ and ‘visibility’ of the website. Companies spend large amounts of money on the development of a website which sadly cannot be indexed by search engines, is rejected by directory editors and which is furthermore invisible to crawlers. The primary objective of this dissertation is to compare and report on the impact of text-based versus graphic-based hyperlinks on website visibility. The method employed in the research was to develop two e-Commerce based websites with the same functionality, contents and keywords, however utilising different navigation schemes. The one website had all hyperlinks coded in text-phrases, while the other embedded the hyperlinks in graphics. Both websites were submitted to the same search engines at the same time. A period of eight months was allowed to ensure that the websites drew sufficient ‘hits’ to enable a comparative analysis to be conducted. Two industry standard website ranking programs were used to monitor how the two websites feature in the search engine rankings. Graphs as well as text-based reports produced by the ranking programs and the t-test were used to compare and analyse the results. Evidence based on the reviewed literature indicated that there are conflicting reports on the impact of text as opposed to graphic hyperlinks on website visibility. However, there is unsupported evidence that text hyperlinks achieved higher rankings than graphics-based hyperlinks. Although the ‘human website browsers’ find a certain amount of graphical aids conducive to easier navigation, ‘search engine crawlers’ find many of these same graphic aids impossible to index. The study supported that the graphic-based website ranked higher than the text-based website, which calls for a balance to be found between these two extremes. This balance would satisfy both ‘human website browsers’ and ‘search engine crawlers’. It is posited by this author that this dissertation provides website designers with the abilities to achieve such a balance. KEYWORDS: search engines, hyperlinks, text, graphics, visibility, navigation, ecommerce, design.

Thesis (MTech (Information Technology))--Peninsula Technikon, Cape Town, 2005 / The overall objective of this study is to identify the importance of culture in the implementation of Information systems and how output influences the success of a system. • The first objective is to assess the organizational culture in each hospital in terms of one of the dimensions of culture on Hofstede's checklist, namely power distance. • The second objective is to determine whether the speed with which a HIS was implemented was a success at the two academic hospitals in the Western Cape using the reduction of the level of backlog (paper based patient registration records) as a measure of implementation progress.

Thesis (MTech (Information Technology))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2006. / This study investigates the impact that e-Ioyalty has on the business success of SMEs. E-Loyalty is defined as a customer's favourable attitude towards an on-line business which ultimately culminates in repeat purchasing behaviour. Eight factors (the 8Cs - customisation, contact interactivity, care, community, convenience, cultivation, choice, and character) have been identified as having a potential impact upon eloyalty. Trust and satisfaction play an important role in generating e-loyalty for electronic business, an aspect which will be elaborated upon within the ambit of the study. Although there is no universal definition of an SME, the definition given by the South African National Small Business Act (Act 102 of 1996) was adopted in this research. Furthermore, an indepth overview of business success was also presented. Business success can be described as more than profit-generation. A myriad of factors investigated influence the success of a business, more particularly; the study focuses on success factors pertaining to 'e-business'. An online survey was conducted on two SME e-business websites i.e., www.buycomputers.co.za and www.take2.co.za. Data collected from 176 online customers demonstrate that all these factors treated separately impact e-Ioyalty. However, when these factors are grouped together, only four of these constructs (i.e., 'Customisation', 'Choice', 'Cultivation', and 'Character') have a significant impact on e-Ioyalty. Furthermore, the data also returned that e-Ioyalty has an impact on two customer-related outcomes: 'word-of-mouth promotion' and 'willingness to pay more'. More specifically, the 'loyal' customer is 'less willing to pay more'. The high cost of attracting new customers on the Internet and the relative difficulty in retaining them make customer loyalty an essential asset for many online vendors.

Thesis (MTech (Information Technology))--Peninsula Technikon, 2005. / This study was initiated to investigate whether power distance facilitates the successful implementation of a hospital information system. A comparative study was done to evaluate the effect of culture on the same information system (CLINICOM), implemented at the same time, but at different locations. The overall objective of this study was to identify the importance of culture in the implementation of In formation systems and how output influences the success of a system. • The first objective was to assess the organizational culture in each hospital in terms of one of the dimensions of culture on Hofstede's check Iist, namely power distance. • The second objective was to determine whether the speed with which a HIS was implemented was a success at the two academic hospitals in the Western Cape using the reduction of the level of backlog (paper based patient registration records) as a measure of implementation progress. The literature was reviewed on what determines the success of an information system. The effects of culture were studied and in particular power distance on the implementation of an information system and how this factor affected the backlog of information entries. Questionnaires were administered to the clerical staff at the hospitals, as they were the high users of the information system. The study showed that both institutions had a high power distance score, but the one institution had a Power distance Index (POI) that was considerable higher than the other. PDr relates to the concentration of authority. This finding suggests that the managers were more autocratic at the one hospital than at the other. The study found that the higher the PDI, the faster the backlog was reduced at implementation. Thus the higher the por the greater the concentration of authority;

Thesis (MTech (Business Information Systems))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2016. / The aim of this research project was to determine what the degree of usability is of a sample of online reservation systems of Cape Town hotels. The literature has indicated that the main aim of website usability is to make the engagement process with a website a more efficient and enjoyable experience. Researchers noted that well designed, high-quality websites, with grammatically accurate content, create a trustworthy online presence. User-friendly sites also attract far more traffic. Previous research has also shown that a loss of potential sales is possible due to users being unable to find what they want, if poor website design has been implemented. Loss of potential income through repeat visits is also a possibility, due to a negative user experience. The research instrument that was employed in this research is usability testing. It is a technique used to evaluate product development that incorporates user feedback in an attempt to create instruments and products that meet user needs, and to decrease costs. The research focused on Internet-based hotel reservation systems. Only the usability was measured. Both standard approaches were used in this research project, in a combined quantitative and qualitative research design. In conclusion, the purpose of this research was to determine the degree of usability of specified Cape Town hotel online reservation systems. The outcomes of this study indicated interesting patterns in that reservation systems met user requirements more often than expected. However, the figures of acceptability obtained were still below the generally accepted norms for usability. The amount of time spent to complete a booking also decreased, as users worked on more than one reservation system.

M.Ed. / Information and communication technologies are effecting widespread changes in all spheres of life including the educational context of South African higher education. While a great deal of emphasis is placed on the issue of bandwidth, and rightly so, the broader context in which the mediation of learning with computers takes place is still to a large degree neglected. It is within this context that the learning experiences of first time e-learners who had participated in the online semester course Education 2A at the R.A.U. University were examined. These students initially appeared to experience great difficulty adapting to the mode of participation in e-learning activity, suggesting that there was a mismatch between the values and priorities of learning as mediated by the web medium and the epistemology of learners situated in cultural practice. The initial problem of struggling to adapt to e-learning, was contextualised as a reciprocal process of interactivity in which the e-learner establishes a relationship with the cultural practice as the result of epistemological, methodological and ontological change. Sociocultural and activity theory provided the main theoretical foundation of this inquiry. In this theory there is a distinction between operations, actions and the overall activity that governs these and that situate the actions. The inquiry was therefore motivated by the need to understand and give substance to the learning experiences of first time e-learners within a systemic view of human computer interaction, as opposed to a cognitive approach to systems design (Kapetelinin in Nardi, 1996:46). Consequently, the inquiry examined the dynamic, reciprocal relationship of interactivity as mediated by the web medium, and epistemological, methodological and ontological transformation of the elearner, as she interacts in this ecosocial system. Motivated by the nature of the research problem and the socioconstructivist theoretical framework which framed my thinking around this problem, the inquiry was designed as a component of a larger action inquiry (Henning, Fortuin, Grobler & Brown, in progress), based on the principle of "communicative rationality" as proposed by Habermas (Ewert, 199 I :34) and conducted as qualitative and interpretive research. It was aimed not so much at monitoring and evaluating the course, but more at capturing and assessing the nature of student learning, specifically the processes of student communication and reflection in their lived experience in the course.

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South African Higher Education has gone through various changes and challenges, one of these being the merger process. Various Universities and Technikons were forced to merge in an effort to aid the transformation and restructuring of the Higher Education landscape in the post-apartheid era. From an ICT point of view, the merged Institutions ended up with massive and distributed computing facilities. These facilities must be managed and secured and it can be appreciated that the complexity and magnitude of this task is compounded by the large and varied user population (i.e. students) using the facilities. With the exploding use of mobile consumer devices (such as cell phones, personal digital assistants, MP3 players, portable storage devices such as flash drives, etc), Higher Education Institutions are faced with the even more complex task of managing and securing the computing infrastructure, while large numbers of students can enter computer labs and use these devices at random. In some circles, portable devices are touted to be the next panacea in higher education. This, together with the popularity these devices enjoy under the student body, makes it a fait accompli that mobile consumer devices are “here to stay”. Therefore, banning these devices from campus computer labs, is not viable. Universities have to find ways to address security issues through the implementation of appropriate protective measures. This research focuses on finding a solution to mitigating the risks imposed on Higher Education Institutions in South Africa caused by the use of portable storage devices. The research proposes a framework which serves as an outline for the countermeasures that Universities must implement to mitigate the risks inherent to the use of portable storage devices. The scope of the research is limited to flash drives, smart phones and MP3 players.

The first section of this paper looks specifically at the concept of greenwashing from a theoretical perspective. It aims to establish exactly what greenwashing is, what it involves and how it has been used. The second section incorporates both the first section of this paper, and delves deeper into how greenwashing has been present in social media. The third section of this paper is a case study. This section has been broken down into three categories of industries in consideration of greenwashing practises. The first is ‘The Obvious’ - this looks at the obvious examples of industries that use greenwashing practises. ‘The Overlooked’ looks at the industries which are often disregarded in terms of greenwashing practises. The last is ‘The Unexpected’ which looks into the industries that focus on supporting the environment and would not commonly be associated with any form of greenwashing practises at all. This case study aims to identify how the selected companies chosen for the study have been associated with greenwashing in the past, and how their current social presence may still be contributing to greenwashed advertising. As the concept of greenwashing is based on a theory developed around two decades ago and mostly consisted of very direct claims and statements using traditional advertising mediums such as billboards and magazine adverts, and considering the amount of well-known corporations who were proven guilty of such greenwashing practises, it would be ignorant to consider that such practises have simply subsided and ceased to occur. Corporations are aware of being called-out with negative press, especially with regards to issues such as false environmental practises, therefore as the advertising industry has changed with time, wouldn’t such greenwashing practises have adapted as well? Corporations in the past have learnt that direct greenwash statements have backfired negatively, therefore in collaboration with the use of social media, the prospect of using subtle, or even subconscious greenwash strategies seem to create an issue which requires investigation.

A significant event of the last two decades has been the appearance and subsequent explosive growth of the World Wide Web and related technologies that have had a notable effect on higher education and learning in particular (Crossman, 1997:19; Hall & White, 1997:22; Alessi & Trollip, 2001:5: Oliver 2002). Information and communication technology (ICT) or ‘elearning’ as it is known in some countries, has emerged both locally and worldwide as a prominent phenomenon in education (Oliver & Herrington, 2001) and the ensuing scramble by educators to adopt the new technologies (compare Rogers, 1995) can be seen by looking at the number of courses that have recently evolved under the banner of e-learning, web-based education or online education. The rush to implement ICT is particularly evident in Higher Education Institutions (HEI’s) where technology has come to be seen as a potentially valuable tool for educational reform in higher education (Poole, 1997:2; Surrey & Land, 2000:145; Bates, 2000:7; Rosenberg, 2001:10). Educational reform at Higher Education Institutions worldwide over the past two decades is often ascribed to trends such as increased competition, decreased enrolments, greater numbers of non-traditional students, changing societal expectations and decreased government funding (Simonson & Thompson, 1997:4; Surrey & Land, 2000:145). The dwindling student base and loss of university students to corporate training programmes in South Africa is in line with these trends and is seen as a major area of concern (McKenna, 1999:[online]). The use of ICT in higher education, which is also progressively taking root in emerging nations such as South Africa, adds another perspective to the issue of educational reform (Hilliard & Kemp, 2000:22). Van Buren-Schele and Odendaal (2001:[online]) put the local situation into perspective by affirming that the introduction of ICT at institutions in developing countries like South Africa can be far more challenging than it is for their counterparts in developed countries. Factors that impact on the implementation of ICT normally include financial, logistic, and technological aspects, but in many areas in South Africa, requirements on a basic level such as access to electricity, computers and the Internet place unique demands on some educational institutions. Local institutions are therefore hard-pressed to improve teaching practice in order, firstly, to live up to consumer expectations, then to show continual improvement and innovations in the changing field of education (Cronjé & Murdoch, 2001:online). / Prof. D. van der Westhuizen