The Curious Paper Co.

The Curious Paper Co. website is a full-stack MERN e-commerce website. The front end has a main homepage containing links to some product collections. There is a 'Products' page with product categories. Within each categorisation, several product cards include an image, title, price and status (available/sold out). Each product has its own product page containing images, description, price, etc. Users can then add products to the cart, checkout using PayPal, and track their orders.

There is also an 'Admin' section where administrators can add and edit products, add, delete and edit users, and change the status for orders to shipped. There is a dashboard containing information on sales using Google Charts. 

The project was created using an array of Udemy courses and YouTube videos, which helped increase my knowledge of React. Whilst I still seek further knowledge and experience to learn about topics such as state management, this project was a great introduction to React for beginners.

I sought inspiration from other online stationery websites to style the website in a user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing way. However, the website is not mobile-responsive, but I may look at pursuing this in the future.

The process initially involved researching other stationery websites to get an idea for the look and feel. However, the world on buying stationery online is varied and unique, meaning that no one store is the same as the other. This meat a wealth of ideas on design and flow were analysed and helped design out the website.

This was the first time using React so I relied heavily on documentation, a couple of Udemy courses for information on creating specific features, and a couple of YouTube videos too (although not many videos out there at the moment on building an e-commerce website using React).

Whilst what has been developed is still in the testing phase, the result is a website that follows the standard flow of an e-commerce website. I was not trying to reinvent the wheel here, more trying to. get experience programming different types of projects for knowledge and experience. The result is a website I would enjoy using if I were to venture into selling my own stationery.

Reach is a very powerful language. I loved building components with it. Most importantly, I loved using Redux for state management. I have no used a comprehensive state management package/library before but I really liked how easy it was to set up states with Redux.

It has made me want to explore other Javascript-related languages.

However, I have learned a lot of stuff about how to create an e-commerce website (in a very basic way) but it had made me realise just to stick with the current e-commerce landscape and not to try and develop my own.