The client is an ecommerce site, meaning that they sell their products online. They need to take orders and accept payments, and receive notifications of these, so they can start packing orders and shipping them out. They will also need to be able to contact their customers when their orders have been dispatched, or otherwise updated.
The client needed a clean and simple way to manage their new site, and that integrates well with the ecommerce, so they were also provided with a CMS to work in tandem.
CMS stands for Content Management System. If you've heard of WordPress, you've heard of CMS.
However, this site was built with a lesser known CMS called Joomla.
Because of this, there isn't the usual setup and vulnerabilities of the more popular CMS.
It does still provide a wide range of features and functionality and still allows you to build a site using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.
The CMS still has those features, and we were tasked to build a theme from scratch, making it a responsive design. It was important to the client that their customers are able to access the site from mobile and make purchases; after all, ecommerce is core to their business model.
Extra support and customisation was given to make sure the site worked as the client desired, and make it far easier for them to use, instead of being lost in additional (and un-needed) features.
As previously mentioned, the site was built using CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and the backend with PHP and MySQL (which is what the CMS utilises).
A custom, lightweight, CSS framework was used to handle the responsiveness, and the main template is done with HTML (as is the industry standard). All the animation and interactivity was handled with JavaScript.
Many things were learnt in this project, namely JavaScript animation and CSS responsiveness. There is a learning curve coming to the CMS, but that wasn't a hindrance.
It was a great way to pull together the front-end areas and back-end of this project, using the correct tech stack.
