Inspiration
We wish that shopping for small businesses was easier online and offline. Almost every small business runs its own website, making it more difficult to shop for multiple businesses or to compare similar products. Outside of this realm, shopping on websites like Etsy, Depop, or Amazon runs a risk of being deceived. The small business you thought you were supporting was actually a drop shipper or a large manufacturer.
What it does
At its first stage, this website would act as a simple middleman between consumers and small businesses. Instead of storing products in warehouses, the purchases will be fulfilled by the small businesses themselves, allowing them to still hold complete creative control over what their customers receive.
How we built it
Using a combination of HTML, CSS, and JS, we built a simple website with limited functionality to display what the end product would hopefully act and look like. Not only did each member contribute to the code and source of the product images, prices, and descriptions, all the assets used in the website were hand-drawn by our members. We did this so the website's aesthetic can come off as friendly and handmade.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge was to learn how to code the front-end and back-end of a website. Except for one of our members, the rest of us had no experience with HTML, CSS, or JS. The back-end code was the toughest to get work on, however, the front-end code took the longest due to us wanting to showcase as much as we could.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
After a long time, to be able to make a full-stack website on our own, with our code is the biggest accomplishment.
What we learned
Everyone on the team learned a lot. Although we tried to delegate tasks to our strengths, we all had to learn something to get the project done. Again, the whole process was completely new to almost all of us, and each of us had to learn how to code in those languages for the first time. After spending so long working with each language, each of us gained familiarity with more parts of the CS world.
What's next for Maker's Market - A One-Stop Shop for Small Businesses
Hopefully, we will be able to bring a product like the Maker's Market into the ... market. We have already set up a zoom appointment with a small business owner to get more insight into the market and get familiar with the small business network so we can make a better product/website for small businesses. The goal of this project was to help small businesses get the revenue they deserve.
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