Rush Industries E-Commerce Site
The Rush Story
Rush Industries is a fictional company I developed as part of an original story. Rush develops time machines and is known particularly for its portable, watch-style time travel devices. In my Visual Communications I class, we were assigned to create brand guidelines for a fictional brand, and I chose Rush. When the second semester ended and I had to decide what I wanted to work on throughout the summer to keep my development skills fresh, I had the idea of making an e-commerce website for Rush, using the brand guidelines I created in the previous semester.
Wireframing and Planning Features
It was at the end of my second semester that I discovered I really have a passion for back-end development, so I had a few ideas for this personal project that I wanted to try, which I didn’t have time to include in my school-assigned e-commerce site. Most of these ideas would revolve around a registration system. Almost every e-commerce site you visit now has the option and/or highly encourages you to create an account with their store. Having a database-driven registration system opens a plethora of opportunities for features, so I began thinking of everything I’d like to have with it: Autofilling user information at checkout, allowing users to see their past orders, allowing users to set a profile picture that appears in the header, and allowing users to review items and see the reviews they’ve written. I made a wireframe and mockup around the ideas I had and started coding.
Old Code and New Challenges
Much of the basis of the Rush website used code recycled from my second-semester e-commerce site. Using the feedback I got on that assignment, I improved what I was recycling by doing things like condensing the product categories in the nav, making the nav and cart links darken on hover, and improving the layout of the single product view page. I also added much more product information to the database for better sorting and searchability. As for the new features, they brought many challenges. Figuring out how to cross-reference tables to show the user’s orders on their profile was a major challenge that I felt very satisfied after solving. The profile picture feature also gave me some trouble, as I wasn’t sure at first how I should store and overwrite the filenames in the database to match how they were being named for storage in the server. Once I figured it out, I was very happy with the result, and even took it a step further by creating a default value in the database on account creation, so that new users would have a default image in place until they set their own photo. Finally, the search feature was in some ways easier than I thought, and in others much harder. I never tackled search as intended in my school e-commerce site, as I thought it would be too difficult. It being one of the last things I added to the Rush site at the end of the summer, however, I had much improved my PHP knowledge and was able to make it work without looking at any resources. I did discover, though, that the queries used to bring up results could be quite limiting, forcing users to spell everything correctly to bring up results. I did discuss with my Web Communications instructor in the Fall how I might be able to improve this and the short answer was that SQL searching is unfortunately just inherently limited, hence why many large e-commerce stores use advanced APIs or Google’s search API. I never had time before summer ended to add a user review function, though I plan to continue working on this site and adding more features soon.
Making Something Real
One of my biggest goals with this site was to try to make something with the scope of a real e-commerce store. In my initial e-commerce site for school, I only did what was required for a basic transaction, but this time around I wanted to imagine a site that would really be used by customers every day. I took user interface and experience more into account with the styles and features, and the result is something I’m really proud of and that I believe feels very intuitive to use. I still have things to add features-wise and content-wise, but I achieved almost everything I wanted to over the summer I took this project on, and everything I incorporated taught me heaps about PHP, furthering my passion for the language.