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THREADSWAP

My initial concept was a much more unique concept - I wanted to create a site in which people can trade their clothes with one another. Unfortunately, this wouldn't quite match the brief, as payments wouldn't be involved, so I instead simplified the concept to a more traditional second hand ecommerce site.

UX

My main focus was keeping the layout simple, as research into other ecommerce sites showed that it can get quite busy on the screen, so having a clean layout kept everything in order.

This meant keeping a fresh colour pallette, and making sure the layout was logical and basic.

FEATURES

Existing Features

Due to the complexity of Django, and not having much time left in the course, I had to keep the project simple, so there aren't many unique features.

Users can create items to be sold, and can purchase items as well.

I struggled to find reason for javascript in this project, however upon researching javascript functions and features, I found the zoom function I implemented on the item detail pages. This helps give the users a better view of the item.

I used this tutorial to accomplish this:

https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_js_image_zoom.asp

Future Features

Due to time constraints, I was unable to hide an item if it was already in the cart. This would make sure that customers can't purchase the same item twice. I believe you would need to create a new boolean field in the item model, that would confirm if the item is in the cart. This would be updated when adding the cart or removing from the cart, and would be used to hide items when looping through them in the items.html page.

I also wanted to implement an in-depth search function, so that if there were many items, customers would be able to easily navigate the website. I had a very basic search function, but struggled with the time left to build on this, so I removed it altogether. I would implement a search function that allows users to search by item type (jumper, shirt etc.) as well as by size, and price.

TECHNOLOGIES USED

This project was created using:

HTML CSS Javascript JQuery Bootstrap Python Django Heroku Stripe S3

TESTING

This project was tested throughout production, I came across too many issues to list here.

Most notably, I had many issues with the implementation of Stripe, as it wouldn't throw out an error message, but the payment would fail every time. This made solving the issue difficult, as I had to simply use trial-and-error to determine the issue. It seemed that the issue lied with JQuery being below Stripe, meaning Stripe wasn't able to use JQuery to function.

I tested each function as it was created, and tested each function after, as an ongoing theme for this project was functions breaking despite not touching them! This was always because a new function I'd created would have impacted it in some way, causing issues with previous ones.

DEPLOYMENT

I used Github for version control, and finally deployed the project using Heroku.

MEDIA

I created my own logo for this project, as I couldn't find a suitable logo that fitted the theme.

This was the only media used, in order to keep the interfact clean and simple

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A huge thank you to:

Brian Macharia - My mentor who helped me keep my priorities in order, and really helped me to understand the fundamentals of Django.

Tutor support - MANY times I turned to them to help me get a head start on resolving many of the issues I faced.

Stack Overflow - I would often turn to help from the users at Stack Overflow to help further with any concepts I couldn't understand