Joel Tobias is a business analyst based in Edmonton who tasked me and my friend Conner Sajjad to create a fully editable portfolio website. The portfolio needed to allow Joel to easily add and edit projects, blogs, and images on various pages of the site. This requirement was met by leveraging WordPress and its flexibility with advanced custom fields, enabling Joel to manage content efficiently through the backend.
I focused on the backend development of the site. My responsibilities included building the custom fields and integrating them into a custom WordPress theme designed specifically for this project. Another significant aspect of the project was the creation of dynamic menus. Using WordPress's built-in menu functionality, I wrote custom code to display the menus within the theme. This allowed for easy modification and reorganization of the site’s navigation structure directly from the WordPress admin panel.
Throughout this project, I gained valuable insights into client needs and the importance of creating adaptable solutions. I learned how to balance technical requirements with user experience, ensuring that the backend was robust while keeping the frontend intuitive. This experience also honed my skills in PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as my understanding of WordPress’s ecosystem, including plugins and custom post types.
Check Out: Joel's Portfolio
The culmination of all my years in the NAIT web stream is my capstone project. For the project I was put in a team of two others and given a client to make a site for. The client for our project was Pacesetter Ski and Snowboard. This is a local Edmonton shop that specializes in equipment and services involving skiing and snowboarding. They're main goal for us was to create a catalogue to display all their products and the stock status of said products. To accomplish this, me and my team decided to use wordpress paired with the WooCommerce plugin. We've integrated WooCommerce with Pacesetter’s Lightspeed POS system, allowing us to directly sync products from their in-store database to our online catalogue. This ensures that the online store reflects real-time updates, whether it's new additions or modifications to existing products.
My role in this project was working mainly on the functionality of the catalogue and theme file using PHP and Javascript. As well as incorporating the advanced custom fields used to update content through the backend of wordpress and the menu styles for navigation and filters.
Creating and managing Advanced Custom Fields was a hurdle I needed to overcome. The filterable navigation with multi-layered menus was difficult to implement. Getting the filters working properly on the catalogue page took some time as I had never done something quite like it before. Earlier on, we had started with an E-commerce focused prototype. Learning to communicate and gather requirements from our client was a growing opportunity. It taught us that not everything is what it seems, and that we needed to understand our client’s needs.
For this school project we were given a design mockup. With this we had to replicate the site using HTML and CSS.
Through this project I learned a lot about different css properties and the abilities to create comprehensive user friendly design. As well as learning integral website functionality like scrolling menus and forms.
Check Out: CSS Chocolate Shop
Gabby is my evil cat that gets whatever she wants. Heres some pictures of her villainy.
