view prototype: https://jasmineenglish.com/demo/sousa
I translated our designer's mockup into a working prototype. This was my pride and joy for a while. This was, without a doubt, the most beautiful, delightful and functional bow dealer website during that time, and quite possibly, still is. Obviously, a lot of that is because of our designer (I hope she feels proud - I'm still proud about how beautiful it is!).
As with Allegro Music Center, this was one of my first forays into JavaScript (jQuery). I used a customized library for the bow viewer and parallax effect. Everything else was written from scratch.
I chose the shared hosting and email provider, set up the database, and did all the code. We didn't have a mobile design, so I didn't write out the CSS with mobile in mind. I don't think any of us thought mobile browsing would explode the way it has, and we figured vendors buying bows were most likely doing so from a computer.
This project was a lot of firsts for me. My first e-mail form, database app, first use of a 3rd party API (Google Maps), first carousel, first AJAX and HTTP requests, first PHP scripts outside of college. A whole lot of jQuery went into this, and it was my first time.
If I could go back and do it all over again, I would:
- Use a minimal CSS grid framework
- Even though we didn't have a mobile design, the desktop design was simple enough that I could have stripped some of the bells and whistles and had a beautiful mobile-ready website.
- Use vanilla JavaScript to build out the menu, bow viewer, dealer directory
- Hide my secrets a little better
- Use client-side validation for the email form
- Use Git. The files that I did push to here, I don't think they are the latest version or organized how I deployed it.