English 420, Business Writing

We gave our White Paper presentation on Monday. Aside from forgetting to pass out the handouts and my typical nervousness it the presentation went smoothly. The review seemed to understand our options and we fielded their questions well.

This week we spent many hours working to together on our white paper. After combining the four sections together last week, we worked to make them seamless and flowing. We incorporated many of the comments we were given to relate the information more to Knight Corporation. We also clarified many of our statements and elaborated on points that we made.

MEMORANDUM

To: Mark Hannah
From: The Sales Team
Date: March 17, 2008
RE: Potential Service Learning Project Site

This week we did our presentation on Dreamweaver which I think went successfully. After the presentation, the rest of the week (until Wednesday when we turned in the draft of our white paper) was spent working on and combining the elements of our white paper. I tried to make the changes that were suggested to make the writing sound more in terms of Knight Corporation. I also added information on servers and server space needed to different calibers of websites. The IBM website had a survey that made a recommendation as to which server would be the best for a company’s use.

This week we took significant steps in starting the composition of our white paper. It was decided that Tabby would write the section on marketing and advertising, Evan would write the section on hiring a third party to construct the site, and I would write the sections on payment systems and web design. In the web design portion of the paper, I presented statistics that will help Knight Corporation pin-point their audience and that audience’s technical capabilities.

This week's emphasis was on the agenda for our technology presentation which we will do on Wednesday. Our program is Dreamweaver so we started by looking at and working with the program to familiarize ourselves with its features and capabilities. It functions like a word-processing document so it should be easy to most people who have worked with Microsoft Word. We did some online research to see how to best break down the process of creating an html file. We noted this information and used our own knowledge to compose a step-by-step handout of how to create a Dreamweaver file.

In class on Friday we made great progress in sketching out possible solutions for what we feel are the three most important aspects of Knight Corporation’s jump into online sales. We thought these three areas were logistics on how to actually construct a website, how to market this new sales medium, and what would be most appropriate for the actual design of the web page. We used brainstorming ideas that we learned earlier in the semester to subdivide each of these three categories into the best options for the company.

Hello Sales Team,

I did a general search through the databases on the library website for "internet sales" and "internet retail." A large percentage of businesses are moving toward the Internet if they have not already done gone there so I don't think we should have too much trouble finding helpful and reliable information and perhaps some business models to imitate. Here are a few examples of articles I found that might be useful:

"Put Your Business Online":

Attached please find my cover letter for a position on the Sales Team. Thank you!

Attached is my Cover Letter for the Workshop.