During the week of the 21st – 25th of February 2022, I was given the opportunity to virtually attend a summer school experience by Immedia where I was exposed to the world of work and tasked with a web development project.

The Project

I was assigned a mentor by the name of Shane, who along with being a really great and awesome guy also attended this very same program not too long ago and really gave me a lot of insight into his experiences and industry best practices.

The project in itself was straightforward – to create a website based on a fictional movie from a selection of popular franchises:

• Harry Potter
• Pokémon
• Marvel
• Lord Of The Rings
• Star Wars

I had chosen to base my website on a fictional movie from the Marvel franchise. This task allowed me to be completely free in how I would design my site and with that came some complexity from which I gained valuable experience.

Building My Website

For my website, I had wanted to give myself a challenge as I am already familiar with the traditional method of building a website using HTML CSS3 and JavaScript from the ground up but also I was wary of the time constraint of just the week as I was required to have a fully-fledged website live on the web.

Due to this, I had chosen to use a CMS where I decided between the WordPress or Wix platforms to design my website as they both allowed me to host my website for free.

I had compared the two and done extensive research and then actually tried to design the page I wanted in each platform.

I found WordPress to be limiting in that a lot of the features such as plugins that would give me form capabilities on my website were locked behind a paywall and I found that Wix allowed me to do this for free and also allowed me to be more creative in my design.

So I decided on Wix.

The Design

My idea for the design behind the site was to make a plausible yet very eye-catching website full of colour and animation. Wix allowed me to do this how I wanted with a few add ons.

• I made use of custom fonts that resembles the Marvel font and a font that had a breaking up effect on the letters.
• An introductory video that plays on the website.
• High-resolution compressed Images of Marvel characters and scenes as well as fan fiction designs.
• Animation on clickable elements.

The Animation aspect is where I had encountered a few challenges as I wanted the animation sequence to be performed in a certain manner on the Home page. After discussing my issue with Shane (my mentor) he had given me a solution which was to try having my animation play after my introduction video.

The problem was that Wix did not allow me to do this with their standard controls but I discovered that Wix had a developer mode called Velo that allowed me to use my own JavaScript and so after a bit of research and reading the documentation I was able to implement my animation sequence. Through all this, I built on my JavaScript knowledge and learnt how to use Wix to my advantage and produce a well-designed working and hosted end product.

SEO

Another challenge I faced was that this was my first time optimizing a website using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This project really taught me a lot about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). With the guidance from my mentor, he gave me the challenge to ensure that the website was SEO friendly and that my meta tags were set. After a bit of research, I was able to do this and overcome the challenge, and learnt something new.

You can visit my published site at: https://marvelsinfamous3.wixsite.com/marvelsinfamous3 or view the images above.

Conclusion

To conclude, I had a very enjoyable time being given a responsibility and executing it to the best of my ability based on the time constraint and gap in understanding of how to do what I what to and through reading, researching, and interacting with my mentor, Shane, I was able to create the site I wanted, how I wanted while still pushing and challenging myself. This was a really great experience that is invaluable that I will definitely refer back to going forward.

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• Web Development by Nikhil
• My Web Development Experience by Serge
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