Inspiration
My second Cloud college project based on a pre-exiting idea I had for an eStore website that sold wifi themed products with view to building a wifi ecosystem around the customer rather then around a particular brand like Apple, Android or Microsoft. The store would house all brands of wifi themed products along with services for customisation and installation in the home creating a seamless wifi ecosystem for the customer.
How it works
My co collaborator on this college project and I agreed on a development schedule that saw base functionality in the first iteration of the website. The basic eStore installed as an extension (Hika Shop) would serve the transactional level online activity. It was configured with full integration with other elements like UPS and Warehousing on the back end along with a seamless front end integration via "categories listing" menu where the established categories are kept housing products with full product details including price, etc. The upper level category pages gave a breakout of the categories of products and services along with links to the actual products themselves. The other menu items are in support of the business describing what wifihome.co is about, how to get into touch with customer services and what to expect in dealing with us.
Challenges I ran into
404 Error after deleting the sample prior to assigning the front page to a new "home page". I had to scrap the website, delete the MySQL database and restore/rework the website to its former glory! Beware, do not delete the sample page in Joomla before assigning the front end page to another "home page" that the site will present as a landing page to the browser. The rework is 100% avoidable and very extensive to do!!.. Other challenges were running on a bootstrapped budget (in College, that means no budget), based on what suitable plugins, extensions, etc that were available for free, we had to make some design concessions based on cost.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Finding suitable skin files for themes, that along with extensions and plugins give a low cost effective e-store for wifi themed projects.
What I learned
404 error, to be avoided at all costs. Collaboration on the project could be more structured using tools like github, trello or slack.com. The design to document fit we agreed upon was not really time efficient. A more structured and formal approach to the project will produce a better quality product in a shorter period of time.
What's next for wifihome.co
If I decided to proceed with the actual business, I would extend the product range, build a centre piece SaaS emulator that users could build their own wifi stores and see its benefits in their homes based on common housing layouts and ensure the customer services side is fleshed out making it more "social".
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