WTC Market
This website is a recreation of a passion project I attempted back in 2023 after I finished college. It massively helped to improve my coding skills, but it also emphasized why the design process is so important. Despite this, it demonstrates that I can be a more flexible designer and create more unique layouts.
Back in 2023, I attempted to create an E-Commerce website that allowed users to buy and sell their own Wordpress themes/plugins. It was an ambitious project, as I also planned to include advanced features such as accounts, forums and direct messaging. I was mainly inspired by CodeCanyon/ThemeForest.
Despite this being a very out-of-scope project for my abilities at the time, I actually got fairly far into development. It was only until the back-end development part when I realised just how massive of a project this was for one person who was still developing as a web designer and developer.
However, the biggest problem during the design process was I effectively didn’t bother with the design process. I had very little patience and didn’t want to bother with creating the wireframes and prototypes, so I essentially just established the foundations, wrote the content, created the sitemap, defined a rough structure and started to code. Due to this, the design was incredibly inconsistent and required a lot of reworkings throughout. This was the project where I learned the importance of the design process.
I actually like the panel-styled layout I went for, as it’s unique from my current, more traditional style of laying out content. Not only is this style organised, it doesn’t affect the UX too much either. I plan on implementing this style again for a future project, perhaps for an online gaming website. However, the UI does look incredibly outdated, due to the poor choices of colours and fonts.
With my improved skillset and gained experience over the years, I’m fairly confident that, by using Figma and tools like React and Redux, I could not only develop the site a lot more efficiently, but I could also create a finalised design before the development process, which would make my life a lot easier.
To improve this website, I’d essentially start from scratch. I would create a Figma file with all the necessary design documents to ensure I had a finalised prototype to work with. In addition to this, I’d use the new technologies I’ve learned since that time (such as React, Redux and NodeJS) to make the development a lot easier.
For more information about this project, please view the website recreation.
