JustByJan.net was sort of my brain-child when first learning how to program years ago. In fact, it’s actually my mom’s website for her crafting business. I had just began a job at a local web development facility as an intern and decided I wanted to redo my mom’s original site by utilizing the skills I was learning during my internship. So I when out and bought a MySQL – PHP programming book (~700 pgs) and read it in a week and dove right in.
JustByJan.com is a full e-commerce site built from scratch (no pre-built CMS). The entire design was a custom design and was tailored to match my mom’s style in her painted designs. The top characters were first painted by her on paper, then scanned in and turned into a Photoshop graphic. The back end has a simple theme interface that allows me to change out graphics and colors based on the time of year should she have the desire to do so.
There is an entire administrative back end built to manage all her products, pricing, stock, news feeds, themes, users, sales, etc. The sales system runs its transactions through PayPal Payments Standard Checkout and PayPal returns an Instant Payment Notification (IPN) to JustByJan.com and the transaction is inserted into her sales history. She can then fill the order and click “Fill” and the buyer is automatically notified of the shipment.
On the front end, users can view their purchase history, see if their items have been shipped and take advantage of “Buy One Get One” deals that are programmed into the sales system.
The site may not be perfect, but it is W3C Valid, relatively quick in terms of load time (biggest bottleneck is shared hosting), and to this day, the only error I get im my email is when the Host’s SQL server is down! I certainly had a lot of fun building this site from the ground up, but it was only the beginning of my Web Design & Development career and I’ve learned a ton since this project.
Unfortunately, JustByJan.net was halted in mid 2012 due a change in career for my mom. You can still access a live demonstration of the website at http://justbyjan.zachlanich.com/
