IC Moves
IC Moves was a website I had to create for a college class. In this class we were learning how to implement search bars and display results to the user based on what was entered such as a price range, area or numbers of bedrooms etc. I had alot of fun building this website and learned a lot of PHP commands while doing so. I would say this or my museum website is my most developed website I have created as there was a lot of back end editing required for this website.
Plan for Website
My brief I was given was to create a website for a fake Real Estate business called IC Moves. The website had to function as a search bar and display relevant results based on the users inputs and requirements. We were encouraged to implement other functioned as well such as running cost calculators, the use of icons and the ability to leave a review. The design wasn’t overly important for this project so we were told to use a bootstrap template of our choice and adapt it to suit our needs for the site.
Design
For this design, the aesthetic design of the website was not the top priority, so visually the website isn’t the most exciting but I still tried to create a good looking and easy to work website that I would want to use. I took inspiration from other realtor websites such as Zoopla with the use of large bold images showcasing the homes and the use of icons to represent certain information on the website like the number of bathrooms, bedrooms, etc. I had to create the logo from scratch so I just created a very simplistic design to place in the website header. I wanted the website to be primarily centre aligned as I thought it would be easier to read and is consistent throughout most of the website.
Creation
There was no designing process before this project as it was primarily a functionality test more than a test of design. I had to use a bootstrap template for this website as we had limited time and couldn’t afford to fully design a website as there was alot of back end work to be done for this website. The website had to take in listings of houses into a PHPmyadmin database and display to the user any appropriate properties based on their search parameters. For example if the user wished to placed a minimum and maximum price then the website would only display appropriate listings based on this information. It was difficult at first learning how to adapt a premade template of a website and code around this, however after a few lessons it became clearer.
Feedback
This website wasn’t presented to my lecturer by myself, I had to transfer all of the files to a hosting server and send the link to my lecturer and allow them to try to use the website in any way they want and give feedback accordingly. The design of the website was great and was simple to use and navigate. My lecturer said I had done well altering the premade template to fit my brief. The functions of the website worked for the most part, the user could easily search and refine search results based on certain criteria such as price or number of bedrooms etc. The functions found within each properties page worked as intended aswell such as the estimated running costs pie chart would change and adapt based on user inputs. There was some shortcomings on the website simply due to time constraint but these were not being graded as part of the class and were simply added on features like the ability to leave a review on the website.