S3 B Tech CSE student develops website for supermarket

The story in Rohith’s own words

I’m Rohith Sunil, I’m a S3 B Tech CSE student at VAST. During this pandemic, I was asked to come up with a solution for our Supermarket that would make shopping more accessible to customers. I decided to come up with an e-commerce site that anyone would be able to easily access, order, and pay so that we can deliver daily essentials right at their doorstep.

Hiring professionals to design and develop a website was a bit out of our budget so I decided to use my skills to create something. This website was built using WordPress and plugins such as WooCommerce, Elementor, etc.

What is WordPress? At its core, WordPress is the simplest, most popular way to create your own website or blog. On a slightly more technical level, WordPress is an open-source content management system licensed under GPLv2, which means that anyone can use or modify the WordPress software for free. A content management system is basically a tool that makes it easy to manage important aspects of your website. There are free website builders out there like wix.com and square space but what makes WordPress Unique is its plugins library.

Since I wanted to create a prototype before hosting the site, so I used a free hosting service called https://infinityfree.net/ to start my online store. With a few simple steps, I had access to my cPanel and was able to install WordPress and get started.

WordPress is a website primarily focused on creating blogs. However, since my objective was to create an online store I had to install 2 main plugins; Elementor & WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that adds e-commerce functionality to your WordPress website so you can have an online store. Once I had WooCommerce installed and set up, I moved onto creating a stock inventory of our available products, adding payment gateways and delivery details; the essentials for any e-commerce store.

Now, I had to take care of the User Experience, that’s where elementor comes handy. Elementor is a free WordPress page builder, that lets you create beautiful WordPress websites in the easiest and quickest way possible. The key difference is that you can reach a high level of design while designing live, and on the frontend of your site which makes elementor unique compared to other page builders. From here I decided to build a basic UI and spent time on Mobile Optimisations to make the site responsive across all sorts of devices.

Adding the website on the home screen using Safari allowed the website to load as a mobile web app. Developing an app didn’t seem sensible at the moment as it would be far easier for customers to access a website than install an app on their device for purchasing groceries. The site was finally complete and fully functional. There is still a lot more to be fixed and improved and changes to be made that I sadly couldn’t do because of my lack of knowledge in CSS. I’m still learning about web development and web designing through courses online hoping to build a standalone site rather than having to rely on sites like WordPress. However, WordPress is the most basic and easiest way to get your hands into the world of web development and would be a great place to start.