The Pack

Once upon a dark and stormy halloween night, in an alternate universe where dogs run the world, there were whispers through THE PACK of a costume contest...

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Inspiration

Inspired by the upcoming, spooky Halloween season and the idea of alternate universes, we decided to merge the two themes together to create a unique website! And so, we lay our scene in a world run by dogs, where Halloween is right around the corner... we present to you: THE PACK and Paw-lloween.

What it does

In an alternate universe, where dogs run the world...

THE PACK is a community specific newsletter that promotes local events, offers relevant blog articles and offers to connect people through their interests and hobbies through groups. Visitors to the site are invited to sign in order to access details to community events and promote their own. Every month the newsletter highlights a feature event, article or person.

This October, THE PACK happens to be promoting a local halloween costume contest, Paw-lloween.

How we built it

Using the exceptionally versatile Velo by Wix platform we were able to quickly and easily build and interactive and beautiful website. We focused on the design and we were very impressed at how easy it really was.

As for the coding part of the project, we used Javascript to handle some specific events, such as a button changing colors when the user's mouse hovers over it. In addition, we also learned to create and implement our own database which keeps track of all the Paw-lloween Submissions. Every time a user votes for a submission, the database in the backend updates the corresponding "vote count" field live.

Challenges we ran into

Given that Velo by Wix seems to be geared to non-developers, the one problem we ran into was trying to edit/customise smaller details that we knew were possible. Things such as rounding corners on text block, changing colours outside of the layout colour scheme or editing the appearance of a single element inside of a container. We managed to use the Velo framework API to figure this out.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are pretty proud of our cute idea to mix the themes provided, also our ability to take what Velo by Wix offered and put our own spin on it, learning their API and mixing and matching their elements, sections and pages to fit our vision for the site. I mean, we assume that's exactly what Velo by Wix aims to enable to do!

As for web development features we are proud of:

  • Intuitive Design that allows for a smooth, unmatched UI experience
  • Voting system, interactive votes that get recorded and stored in a backend database in real time!
  • Submission form which alerts the admin of the site by email for every new submission

What we learned

Our team has never used Velo by Wix before so this was quite a learning experience! We were really impressed with the easy to use interface offered by Wix. This left a great impression on us. From this experience, we learned that Velo by Wix is an incredible tool for developers to use to further customize their sites! We also had the chance to read up and interact with their Javascript APIs to handle some special events on our site; such as the Paw-lloween voting system!

What's next for The Pack

You'll just have to tune in for next month's edition of THE PACK and see what the dog world from the multiverse is up to!

...But on a serious note: Our team really looks forward to working and improving the backend of the website. Some functionalities on the current live site are simply prototypes and do not function to the extent that we would like them to. However, we are proud nonetheless of all the features we were able to deliver during this hackathon!

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