Productive Web Application for Construction Guiding, Consulting and Providing Services

Abstract

Up to now, the Internet provides a vast platform for industries to expand their business opportunities. However, people do not obtain the maximum benefit from using modern technology in the construction process. For example, purchasing land, selecting house plans and purchasing hardware items is still done in the traditional way. Furthermore, most people are unaware of the approvals and permissions that must be obtained from the appropriate government authorities prior to the beginning of civil construction. Meanwhile, people do not have many facilities to get the right service from the right professional or the most suitable person at the right time. In this research, a web application is proposed to solve the above problems. Background research was conducted to discover available technologies and similar web applications in the market. Eleven websites that are related to the objectives of the proposed web application were referred. Some of them were for purchasing land [1], house plans [2] and hardware items [3] and some of them were for providing contact details of the service providers [4]. However, users cannot get access to all the functionalities related to home construction from a single website. Hence, the main aim of this study is to develop a productive web application for the construction industry, which provides guidance, consultation and services for users and service providers. The business need of the web application is to acquire financial benefits by hosting it on the Internet. The developed web application will enable someone to sell their land through paid advertisement. It will also allow professionals to publish their details on the web application through paid advertisement. Online hardware store can be maintained which will give a direct income to the person who maintains the web application. The next advantage is that professionals can use the web application as an advertising platform to publish their advertisements. Accordingly, it gives a solution to unemployment. HTML, CSS, JQueries and Bootstrap are used for the front-end development of the proposed web application. For backend development, PHP is used. Phpmyadmin is used for the database creation and management. SQL is used as the query language to fetch data from a database. The evaluation process was carried out for the verification and validation of the developed web applicationDomain experts and technical personnel participated in that process in which bugs and errors were identified and fixed. Feedback was received and relevant suggestions were implemented to maximize the usability of the web application.