In this small business website redesign, we aimed to increase consumer trust and improve purchase conversions.

Overview

Living in the city is great because there are so many opportunities to get involved with the tech community. Girl Develop It and Women Who Code are organizations with especially active chapters in my area, who are always trying out new events. My first Hackathon was the first event of its kind that Girl Develop It had put on, and it was definitely a success.

Going in, I had no idea what to expect. It was nerve-wracking to collaborate so intensely with a group of people I had never met before, but I was relieved that once we got started we seemed to naturally fall into roles that utilized our strengths.

Our only guidelines were to choose an idea and use html, css, and Javascript to develop it into a presentable project by the end of the day.

We decided to redesign a local business website to make it more professional-looking and use design strategy to increase conversions of visitors into paying customers. We also made it possible for prospective customers to purchase items directly on the site by adding Javascript that lets you add items to a cart.

Process

My primary roles in this project were design and project management.

It was satisfying to take everything I learned from my bootcamp and apply it under pressure.

I planned out the structure of the site using sitemaps and wireframes, and created a style guide with our color palette and typography.

We decided to use Bootstrap to build our site, since it's useful for getting a responsive prototype up quickly. We supplemented this with custom classes and css when needed.

Here's a video of the final product:

Reflections

My advice for anyone thinking about doing a Hackathon would be to think about your strengths before go, and how you can make valuable contributions.

For someone coming from a Bootcamp setting where I've used Git and Github, but not collaboratively, this was a good opportunity to get more comfortable making commits on a team.

There was enough time to learn new things (I learned how to use APIs) and implement it into the final project.

I left the day with a lot of confidence, and the satisfaction of having built a website in a few hours.