Tote Co.

Story

One day I rolled into class and my business teacher told me about a program. It was called the JA Company Program. Their mission is to help high school students to start and run their own business in a low risk environment. So, I signed up. I eventually became the VP of IT at this company and developed their website on basis of Shopify. I knew HTML and CSS from before but this was my first real web development project. I learned a lot of things during this process, like flexbox which is amazing. This was my first year in a JA Company as a Grade 9 student, and I look forward to doing this program every year, evolving my skills as I do it!

What it does

The website is a clean and minimalistic experience for whoever is visiting our website. My team and I added some other features:

Featured Artists Page

This is a page where we can connect artists and small businesses with each other and our own customers with them as well.

The Blog

Animations

I spent a lot of time into making all animations perfect, seamless and satisfying. I used the Animate on Scroll library for all the scrolling animations and the normal :hover pseudo class for the normal animations.

How I built it

It was pretty hard at first since I hadn't coded in a long time and my HTML and CSS knowledge was rusty. But once I got the hang of it, I was on a streak. The total for the Featured Artists Page was a 1000 lines of code.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I learned a lot more stuff than I already knew while working on this website:

Flexbox - This is one of the things that I discovered a while after I made the cards for the Featured Artists Page. I thought that it definetly needed to be responsive since most people will be visiting straight from our Instagram so I tried making a bunch of @media-queries first but it was too much work. Eventually, I discovered flexbox and it got the job done.
Got VS Code - I felt it was too hard writing everything by myself so I found basically the best code editor on the planet: VS Code.

Built With

Created by

When I first joined the company program, I was very skeptical of how my skills would be put to use. However, when we had our first official company meeting, it left me with a very positive impact. I eventually became the VP of IT at Tote Co. My role was to help everyone with all things tech and make the website. This was my first real coding project and I was very scared that I would mess this up. I hadn’t coded in a long time since I took a free course a year ago. I redid the html and css course, and started working on the website. At first it was easy since I was building with Shopify’s UI. Then I wanted to add custom stuff that couldn’t be done with shopify’s controls. I had a lot of challenges and I was struggling a lot. I probably spent 100 hours developing that website and an even longer time debugging it. Eventually, after spending an unimaginable amount of time, I finished it. All in all, I will definitely be doing JA next year since I loved doing this every Wednesday and learned a lot of stuff! Since then I’ve started developing my own website!

Vihaan Sharma
I was the President of Tote Co. From weekly meetings to pitch competitions, I led the team and maximized each member's talent, giving them roles that were meaningful to them. I also worked in all aspects of the company including marketing, IT and finance.

Ryanna Luo