Home View of the diving website designed by the ITS Abmas team

ITS Campus, ITS News – Tourism is one of the sectors most affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, as is the case for Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) that provide diving services, which have experienced a drastic decline in customers. For this reason, the Community Service team (Abmas) of Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) developed a digital diving business service website to promote the existence of diving SMEs.

Dr. Mudjahidin ST MT, head of the Abmas team for the Enterprise Systems Laboratory, ITS Information Systems Department, revealed that this activity aims to help MSME partners providing recreational diving services. Mainly to provide information in a structured manner according to the needs of partner customers.

The abmas output from the Enterprise Systems Laboratory is a website (link: https://divingeden.com/) as a means of marketing the products and services of MSMEs that provide diving services. “This is to increase sales volume and expand the marketing area,” said the Lecturer, who is familiarly called Mudja.

Diving website page by the ITS Abmas team that displays details of a diving point

The process of designing this diving website uses the Research Online Purchase Offline (ROPO) approach. Because in this digital era, people tend to do research online first before buying a product or service. So that users who are interested in buying products based on the information provided, will then be directed to MSMEs that provide diving services.

With this approach, MSME partners such as Surabaya Diving (link: http://www.surabayadiving.com/) can quickly market their services online with a variety of complete, centralized information for a broader market scale. Meanwhile, the benefit for website visitors is an increase in interest and knowledge related to diving tourism, so it is expected to accelerate decision-making to purchase services from partners.

The Head of the Information Systems Department continued to help partners get new customers back or retain old customers. “So the diving service business will run continuously in the pandemic era,” explained the ITS Industrial Engineering alumnus.

Galih Rendi Styawan as the coordinator of the student team who joined the Abmas, explained that there is structured data about diving spots on the website. On the home page, visitors can find various diving locations in Indonesia. Then, there is also complete information about dive points starting from a description of the site of diving spots, the variety of marine life that can be found when diving, and a list of MSMEs that provide diving tourism services for specific locations.

The ITS Abmas team, when socializing the website to Surabaya Diving partners

Website visitors can also find out information on water and surface conditions from a diving point, the best time to come, as well as specifications that prospective divers must meet. “In addition, this diving website can also motivate users to share their diving experiences with the diver logs feature,” explained the 2017 student from the Information Systems Department.

This Abmas activity was completed within six months. As of March 2021, the Abmas team has started the analysis of partner needs by conducting online interviews, one of which is with the owner of Surabaya Diving, Jimmy Lengkong. In addition, interactive interviews were conducted with potential partner customers as end-users of the diving website.

Furthermore, according to Galih, website development is carried out interactively by a team of lecturers and students, starting from designing the display design and website architecture tailored to users’ needs. Then the domain and hosting selection is then carried out, and website testing ensures that the website is ready to be used by partners and potential customers.

Website socialization to MSME partners providing recreational diving services, namely Surabaya Diving by the ITS Abmas team

Finally, Galih continued, there was socialization to partners, especially Surabaya Diving, to run the website smoothly. “In addition, a soft launch is also carried out for potential users to receive feedback that will be used as an evaluation of further development,” he said.

At the end of the conversation, the entire Abmas team (the Lecturer of the Enterprise Systems Laboratory and the team of students who joined) hoped that this website could continue to be developed in terms of adding dive location information by partners and also features that would be of interest to the recreational diving community. Thus, this can increase the number of diving communities who visit the website to conduct research and ultimately increase the sales volume of recreational diving MSME services. (far/ITS Public Relation)

Reporter: Najla Lailin Nikmah