Alli's Cheesecake is a responsive website project I built for a client of mine who owns and operates a small part-time cheesecake business. The website will allow customers to view and order my client's cheesecake products directly on the website and once ordered, my client will prepare the cheesecake and communicate with the customer for pickup details.
Stack used: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Snipcart, Netlify.
The purpose of this project was to build a fully responsive website solution for my client that will allow customers to view and order cheesecake products directly on the website. It was also to help solidify my HTML, CSS and JavaScript knowledge and skills.
I knew I wanted to give my client a complete solution by having the orders take place directly on the website. This created the first challenge I faced as I knew I needed backend knowledge and skills to incorporate a shopping cart and checkout page into the website. The first solution I came up with was to make an order form that customers can complete that will take their information and order request and my client would then get in touch with the customer and complete the order process and purchase away from the website. I didn't like this solution as it wasn't a seamless process and left most of the work on my client on top of doing all the baking. I did some research and found out about Snipcart which is an HTML/JavaScript shopping cart tool for developers which allows you to add a shopping cart platform to any website or web app. This was the exact solution I was looking for and I was able to effectively integrate it to my project. Now the only thing my client needs to contact the customer for is pickup details while everything else is covered.
I really enjoyed building this website project for my client because it taught me a lot and helped me solidify my fundamental web development technical knowledge and skills and helped me further improve those technical skills especially with CSS. This project gave me some insight and a bit of experience into freelance work and creating something for your own clients. It was a pleasant experience to build something that will be used to help a business.
By doing research and finding the Snipcart solution to my shopping cart issues, I learned that there are many tools and libraries out there that can even help Front End Developers build almost anything they want even with only a limited knowledge of back end development.