Our team designed and developed an E-commerce for books. We optimized the design of reviewing and searching function to provide a better user experience. Streamlining the book managing process and make it easier for administrator to monitor and manage the book inventory.
Bookstore & Accessories is an E-commerce website for books designed during my fourth year school project. The bookstore is not only benefits visitors and members, but also convenient for the administrators and partners to interact with. There are three main objectives for website design and development. Firstly, the website will establish a membership program that increases the sign-ups. Secondly, the website will streamline the book-finding process and make it easier for customers to navigate and direct purchase using the registered information. Finally, the administrators can run reports of selling history in order to efficiently strategize the selling options.
The main challenge was to design and develop the E-commerce website from scratch that fufill the required functions. Initially, I lacked experiences in front-end web development but we had a tight time schedule. It was difficult for us to design all the functionality, developed the front-end and back-end of the website, and deploy our entire website in no more than two weeks.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every segment of society, including individuals and institutions. The internet ecosystem has been playing a pivotal role all over the globe. Due to the pandemic, the dependency on online book shopping has increased significantly since the libraries and bookstores were closed for a long time. Therefore, the bookstore & accessories aims to sell various types of books that will appeal to readers of different age groups. The bookstore intends to offer a wide range of fresh and exciting books that meet customer expectations.
For the site palette, vivid blue was chosen as the main colour website. After comparing most of the bookselling websites such as Indigo, Amazon and Archambault, I found out that they all have formalist colour schemes and layouts. Psychologically, when people think of this colour, they may think of some attributes like refresh, being relaxed and spirituality. I want the website to offer a feeling that reading books and gaining knowledge from them is a delightful thing.
I used Nerko one font for the main side of the website that is visible for visitors and members. It gives a funky, exciting and modern look while staying smooth and sleek.
Since the main focus for this project is to strengthen my front-end development skill, I created the website wireframes to represent the skeletal framework of the website.
It was a fun yet challenging experience working on this project because crafting a website and implementing most of the functions in a short time was not an easy journey. Since I only had knowledge in basic HTML, CSS and Javascript, in the beginning, I struggled a lot using the javascript libraries because it was impossible to learn and master a library in only two weeks. Therefore, I decided to use vanilla javascript for website development. The bookstore website has been one of the most rewarding projects I’ve worked on although there was still a lot of improvement needed. For example, the design of the main page and the administration page were not consistent, and there were alignment issues that affected the website aesthetic. Lastly, this project helped me understand more the communication between the frontend and backend of the and the overall architecture of E-commerce websites.
Due to the time constraint, we weren’t able to conduct a better visual design for the website. I would like to redesign the website layout and workflow. At the moment, the website navigation is not user-friendly since my focus was to deliver a functional website in a short time frame. The other thing I want to improve is to make the website responsive.
