Sparck Moto is a small business based in Albany, Oregon that was founded in 2013. It sells motorcycle components, harnesses, gear, and other related merchandise. The website for the business had some outstanding issues affecting its performance. Our project is to upgrade the reliability and usability of the SparckMoto e-commerce website. Over the course of the school year our team has added a substantial number of features. These features include building a web administration page, a cookie-based product checkout + shopping cart, a complete overhaul of site styling, and much more.
The product administration page was the most time consuming and in-depth feature on the website and allowed the business manager to easily edit, add, and delete products and categories. The site also provides functionality to edit the images, thumbnails, description, price, and other attributes for any product on the website. Search query and filtering methods were included as well to make finding specific products easy.
Our team also converted the existing checkout and cart functionality, to a cookie-based approach rather than a session-based one. While the session-based approach worked, it introduced strange session timeout bugs when users left pages open too long. The new system is now robust to timeout bugs and will persist even if the website host needs to restart.
The project is built and operating on the Microsoft .NET Framework MVC 5, a popular web framework. The code base is stored using Azure DevOps which is deeply integrated with Visual Studio, the primary development environment. We are using a MYSQL database to store the product, order, and payment data. We primarily used a combination of Bootstrap 3 and custom CSS for site styling.
This project will support the Sparck Moto business by enhancing the customer experience on the website and allowing easy administration of the site.
