Quilters’ Corner

Challenge:
This group project, (class WEB 350) paired us with a local client and college alumni. The owner, whose store is in rural Vermont, wanted an e-commerce site. A constraint on the project was that she had little time and experience with managing a site.

Solution:
OS Commerce, an open source application, was chosen for the back-end of the site. To give the site better usability and professionalism, I designed a custom front-end to allow authorized users to post content in fields to make announcements. To make it much easier and less stressful to use, the fields used preformatted HTML and created a preview so that the user would avoid making mistakes viewable.

Results:
While quite proud of the site, implementing the site was a complete failure. The client was not capable of supporting the site, group dynamics were dysfunctional at best, and as default group leader I overestimated their enthusiasm to create both a working site and standout portfolio piece.