Inspiration
When we enrolled in UCI in our first year, we were thrived on asking if there were used goods in Wechat groups where information wasn’t organized and we needed to scan thousands of chat histories to find the one thing we needed, and so long we haven’t discovered any convenient second-hand trading software which is as comfortable as the software we used in China. We also have tried to use eBay as it is one of the most notable used goods software in the U.S., but the high taxes, delivery fees, and the profits earned by eBay made the price of the goods unacceptable and not attractive to us at all. Therefore, we had the idea to make ZotMarket a platform for UCI students to post their used goods and make them shine again in other UCI students’ hands.
What it does
In ZotMarket, we organized the information about the goods posted by students and make all UCI students able to view the information and they can contact the buyer by themselves if they are interested. In such a way, students can get what they need really fast and escape from the high transaction fees when they are paying on other online platforms.
How we built it
We built this webpage mainly through HTML, CSS, and Javascript. we implemented this webpage by using many techniques we learned from the web development workshop in the hackathon such as having padding and spacing to make users get more clear about what they should be focused on.
Challenges we ran into
Many challenges we got are from the language side since we all know little about web development and it is quite challenging for us to design the first website we have in cooperative programming. For example, one group member was stuck on using Github to push and pull work from vscode to GitHub, and the synchronizing process just went forever. Thankfully a mentor helped us out by letting us use the command line to solve the issue. Another issue we ran into is building a responsive website since we wanted to build a website that is in good shape on both PCs and phones, and that is a challenge that we must search for many samples and ask mentors to solve.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of the ability to design a clean and beautiful webpage for now since it is only our first step on this project. The UI/UX is a huge part of our project and we want to make it even better in the future since we spent a lot of time discussing the color and themes.
What we learned
We learned a lot about the techniques for web development and experienced cooperative programming through Github. In classes, many pair programming where just one people write code and one person watches through Zoom, which is not the case in real industry. This hackathon gives us the experience of real teamwork and would prepare us for how to cooperate with the team in future tech careers. We also learned a lot of web development skills and realized that knowledge learned from classes is never enough and we should start to learn tools such as React, API, AWS... There are so many techniques to learn and we should take our chance to learn them before too late, so this hackathon is also a reminder for us to never be satisfied for earning a good grade in the class.
What's next for ZotMarket
In general, there are many future designs that we haven’t completed in this hackathon but are very interested in completing them in future developments. For example, we would like to add more animations in to the side bar and mouse/keyboard interactions. Also, fulfilling the sidebar functions and search functions and clicking on the ZotMarket icon to return to the homepage is another improvement that we would like to complete. For us, there are so many more possibilities for this website and we think it is a great idea if we can finish it, and we really appreciate that we can pitch this idea at VenusHack.
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