During the design part of the project I was researching about different open source ecommerce. I had discovered 3 that were above the rest; wpcommerce, magento and prestashop.

What I had learned was that WPcommerce was easy to learn and put into use but had the great downfall of limited use. This made me look into magento; the beast of all Ecommerce. Looking at the code involved and all the different variables I was stomped. There was so much customization that it was overloaded!

Now, my savior….prestashop. At first impressions it looked quite difficult to learn how to use it (there was no documentation on  the site, although the community was quite helpful). So after a few hours of looking at some example sites I decided to give it a go.

To be honest its impossible to learn to use it without the help of the default prestashop template. So just a bit of editing helped out a hell of alot! So now I’m onto my second Prestashop site, SHhhh clothing (another local brand) and I’m loving it so far!

After around 10 months I’ve gotten around to actually completing the site. Well alike most online bloggish portfolios this site is entirely run by wordpress! The entire theme was hand designed and coded (which is pretty good for a 15 year old). It has been difficult trying to juggle web design, school, friends and family but somehow I’ve done it; although some things had to pay the price for this.

Now, onto about how the site was made…

To get the whole design of the site I had gone through about 200 different websites and a whole lotta CSS galleries (designbomb is the best so far in my opinion). The biggest influences on the design are Elliot Jay Stocks site, Matt Bretts themes on themeforest  and Adii’s WooThemes collection. To me they’re the best in the biz!

It had taken about 25 iterations of the site, each one very different from another with only 8 going through to markup and only 3 to wordpress. But at last! I have found one I really do I like.

Some of the backend thanks go to:

• The wordpress team
• TimThumb
• Jquery

Well sooner or later I’ll go into further detail but unfortunately the site still isn’t completed, it should still only take about 4 or 5 days left!