Publishing Task 2 - CMS - B00138135

Introduction

The site I will be making for my main assignment will be called Super Sound Shop. It will be an online shop that sells vinyl records, CDs and also sound equipment like record players, hifi systems, etc.

A) What We'll Build

As previously mentioned my site will be called Super Sound Shop. It will be catered to music enthusiasts who are interested in purchasing physical copies of music (e.g. vinyl records, cassettes and CDs) and high quality sound equipment to play these media formats (e.g. record players, hifi systems, high quality headphones and speakers).

The result will be a clean and easy to use shopping site that is functional on both mobile and desktop. It will also feature user submitted product reviews to help a user decide on their purchase and blog posts that inform the user of the latest product trends in the music industry.

I plan to incorporate several UX features into my site that will improve the overall experience for the user. Two of them are listed below along with images that show these features in action from the musicrecordshop.com site.

1.  Similar or related products will be shown in a horizontal scrolling window when a customer is viewing a product.
2. A search bar so a customer can quickly find what they're looking for without endlessly browsing pages. This search bar will display relevant results in a drop down form as the customer types.

I researched UX principles for shopping sites by reading the following sources:

1. Volusion - 9 Features that Improve the Ecommerce User Experience (UX)
   https://www.volusion.com/blog/features-that-improve-the-ecommerce-user-experience-ux/
2. Greg Nudelman - DESIGNING SEARCH UX Strategies for eCommerce Success - https://uxmag.com/wp-content/uploads/files/uploads/nudelmandesigningsearch/DesigningSearch_GregNudelman_C01.pdf

B) Why Build It?

The motivation for building my site is based around the negative experiences I've had when using many e-commerce sites that failed to implement proper UX and UI features. An example of this would be the Tower Records website (https://www.towerrecords.ie/) which appears very cluttered and uses an outdated design. A couple of examples of this are below.

While their site is functional, I have found it difficult to browse and find what I was looking for in an adequate amount of time. This is why I want to build my own better looking and functioning music site. In order to achieve this I will focus on implementing as many useful UX features as possible including a sticky add to cart function, a one page checkout to speed up the payment process and also including multiple payment options.

C) How to Build It?

The site will be built primarily using plugins. Some plugins that I may end up using could include WooCommerce, Customer Reviews for WooCommerce and Advanced Woo Search.

 The theme I choose will be one that allows me to easily rearrange content, add custom links to the nav bar and customise my shops logo.

Code snippets may end up being useful to help filter out spam and potentially vulgar or offensive language in the customer review sections.

A youtube video titled How To Create An eCommerce Website With Wordpress 2022 -ONLINE STORE- (Easy For Beginners) may help me with implementing some of these feature on my site.

An example of how I would like my product page to look. This can be done using the WooCommerce suite of plugins.

The following blog post details some useful code snippets that could be used on my site if I choose to use Woocommerce. https://linksoftwarellc.com/blog/five-woocommerce-snippets-we-use-on-every-project/