I built an ecommerce store called “The Plant Collective” that sells house plants and plant related items.
Unfortunately I was not able to add in all of the personalization aspects to my pages that I was planning on. I had trouble with cookies and couldn’t get everything working that I wanted to when it came to personlizing each page to add to the overall user experience.
I am most proud of actually completing this e commerce website. Never in a million years did I think I would 1. have the opportunity to do this and 2. actually follow through and complete a project like this. I am amazed that I have a working website and everything works with one another from the products pages, to the cart, and even some personalization sections within my website. Before this class, I couldn’t write a single line of code now here I am finishing up this big project. Myself alongisde my peers have came a long way.
I enjoyed the UI design part the most out of everything however I least happy with how mine came out. Because I knew we weren’t mostly getting graded on the UI design I didn’t put as much time into it as I would of liked. There are some pages in my opinion that aren’t the most aesthetically pleasing. If I had more time I would have liked to spend more time on the design aspect of my website.
Developing assignment 3 differed from the past assignment because this time we were using cookies and sessions. Overall implementing these features made passing data a lot easier than I expected. Compared to assignment 2, using sessions was easier than passing data in a query string. Assignment 3 was definitely more work than assignment 2 because it had more requirements and aspects to implement. So more time was spent in the creation of assignment 3 than 2.
When I ran into a problem I would refer to the assignment code examples and the past lab to figure out what I am doing wrong. If I had any specific questions I would either go to the internet or collaborate with classmates to solve my issue at hand. I also worked with Port when I couldn’t get my code to work and need some guidance. Meeting with Port helped clear up any confusions I had and it showed me things can be done in a much simplier manner than I originally thought.
Implementing the code examples worked well for me because I was able to use the code examples to get some aspects of my website to work. I am grateful Port had these accessible to us. Once I understood what the examples did it was easy implmenting it into the rest of my code. For the email portion specifically, the code examples helped tremendously.
Something that did not work well in my assignment was getting everything done that I wanted to. I created a timeline to follow however certain steps took me longer than I expected it to be. For past assignments I was able to follow timelines I created but for assignment 3 I fell behind schedule. For example getting my cart to work took twice as long as I excepted which delayed the rest of the timeline.
I learned how to use session and cookies to store my data in there and request it to generate on other pages. This was my first time getting to use cookies and sessions in my work and I definitely learned the significance of them throughout this whole process.
If I were to go back in time and do things differently I would have started a lot earlier. Towards the end of the week leading to the due date I was frantically rushing to finish the assignment. It was a little difficult to start early because of Thanksgiving break but that is no excuse.
I would say I spent 30% of my time thinking about how to do something, 15% of my time writing code, and 55% testing and debugging. The reason why testing and debugging always took the longest was because of how tedious the whole process was. I almost always had a lot of errors in my initial code that I would have to think about and work through before it actually worked.
I did not work on a team.