A realistic website for a small business
After building a porfolio I was satisfied with, I had a look at potential job opportunities in my area. A lot of these involved making websites for small businesses, such as garden centres.
To demonstrate my ability to work on such a website, I decided to apply my web design skills to wireframe a potential site for a fictional garden centre, building it myself using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Though I came up with my own original design, it was heavily inspired by some of the websites I'd seen built for a few of my local garden centres. These sites were all built by small web development teams.
After finishing, I was impressed with how professional my website looks and feels considering I worked on it alone. It is easy to navigate, and works well on multiple screen sizes too.
While I was looking at websites for local businesses in my area, I noticed that WordPress was frequently used for such simple sites, commonly with the Elementor building platform.
I had used WordPress briefly in the past, but I decided to build my first full-scale project with it. I would remake my previous Garden Centre using Wordpress with Elementor, to see for myself the advantages using them over vanilla JavaScript.
I had never used Elementor before, but I was able to pick it up quite quickly after watching a couple of video tutorials on YouTube. In a few days, I managed to create a similar website to my previous with mostly the same information, but formatted according to a template provided.
I was impressed with how quickly I was able to create such a professional looking website. While not offering as much flexibility as JavaScript (especially so without a paid Elementor account), I could still see the obvious advantages in using these tools for creating simple, routine websites for small companies such as local businesses.