Redesigning ARE Tahiti's Website
Although I love to code, sometimes being inside on the internet all the time gets to be a bit much and I need to go outside and get some fresh air. So whenever I get the itch, I love to go out on the water and do some outrigger canoe paddling. One of my friends works as a representative for a company building canoes in Tahiti. He knew I built websites and asked if I wanted to redesign the companies website. I jumped at the opportunity to mix paddling and coding and go right to work. This is what I built:
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If you want to checkout the menu for yourself, here are the links to the Github repository as well as the actual webpage (coming soon):
How It's Built
To begin the process, I started by communicating with my client to establish their goals for the new site. Their main objective was build a cleaner, more modern looking website that would load quickly on all devices. Other than that, I was allowed to take as much creative liberty as I liked. With that in mind, I got to work building some prototypes in Adobe XD. This allowed me to finalize the design with the client before I actually started building the site.
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Once I had my design finalized, I started coding. I chose to develop the site's back end in Django, since I wanted to use the built in SQLite interface to allow the company to manage their inventory without using a third party system. I also wanted to write custom CSS for this site, so I spent a lot of time initially setting up all of my styles for my different elements.
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As I mentioned before, I wanted the inventory system for the boats to be run using Django's built in SQLite database and admin system. The built in tools made setting up the inventory a breeze and I was finished in no time at all. The other major features I built in was a language translation drop down menu and a JavaScript function to handle currency exchange rates. ARE Tahiti is an international company, so users from multiple different countries needed to be able to use the site
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To handle translation, I setup a JavaScript function to turn on and off different divs containing the translations of the text in each language. I also stored the language setting in the session storage of the website so the user doesn't have to reset their viewing language when they switch pages. And finally, I used a free currency exchange rate API to calculate currency exchange for the different regions that the canoes are sold in.
Takeaways:
One of the big things this project taught me was the value of planning ahead. If I hadn't taken the time to communicate with the client, I probably would have spent a huge ammount of time and effort making small design changes that would have bogged down the design process.
I also learned how important it is to know how to find resources for what you're working on. Since I was working on this project alone, my Googling skills were really put to the test everytime I ran into and obstacle.