Inside the Project: The Book Reviewer
This article will outline the design, implementation and testing of The Book Reviewer, a project I designed and developed in my second year of college. To conclude, I will give my final thoughts on how I thought the project went as a whole.
📐 Design
This project had a major focus on design. At the beginning of the project development lifecycle, I planned out how every page was going to look on paper by drawing rough wireframe sketches. Once I was happy with my designs, I started taking my designs to Photoshop. I paid very close attention to detail in relation to typography, visual hierarchy, spacing, overall layout and image placement. This was to ensure the design was consistent and could be easily adapted for other pages. Click the button below to view a high-resolution PDF of the home page design, created in Photoshop. Please keep in mind, it may take a few seconds to render in your browser.
Once I was happy with the visual design, I started designing the database. I used a MySQL database (hosted locally) for this project. Below you can see an entity relationship diagram of the final database. You can also view the SQL file for this database by clicking here.
🛠️ Implementation
A MySQL database was used to store this project’s back-end data.
The Bootstrap CSS framework along with custom CSS was used to implement the project’s visual design.
PHP was used as the scripting language to retrieve the data from the database and display it in the browser.
HTML was used to structure each of the web pages.
You can view all of this project’s code on GitHub by clicking here.
🧪 Testing
To debug my project’s design I used the Google Chrome DevTools environment. This helped me easily solve design issues with the project.
To debug and test the back-end code of the project I used PHP debugging methods. I echoed out the variables and arrays (using pre-tags). This helped me understand what was going wrong most of the time and helped solve problems through trial and error.
🤔 Final thoughts
Overall, this project was a great learning experience. I learned how to take a design and fully implement it into a web design project. At the time, PHP was very new to me so it helped me understand the fundamentals of how it worked and gave me great experience that I was able to use in other projects. The final submission had a few bugs, but overall I feel it was a success because of how much I learned in the process.
🚀 Showcase
You can view a showcase of this project by going to this sites home page, or by clicking here.