Pool Vikings
Pool Vikings is a static business website built with Bootstrap, Java, Spring, and Thymeleaf. Being in the Pool Industry myself for a long time, I really wanted to design something that I felt would be a nice catch for the normal pool customer.
Type
Static
Business
Stack
Java
Spring
Bootstrap
Source Code
GithubProject Goal and Purpose
This project was intended to attract and route users to a contact line by providing them with information about the company's services and culture. For this reason, the architecture of the project revolved mainly around different pool departments. The atmosphere of the website was designed to create a cooling and joyful environment, encouraging customers to reach out to the office contact line without hesitation.
Web Stack Choices
This project was mainly about learning Bootstrap and creating the ability to understand and use templates. Java and Spring were chosen for quick deployment, which allowed haste routing between views through an MVC design pattern.
Thymeleaf was implemented because it's an excellent option to pair with Java and Spring with its server-side template engine. This made for good performance and a quick transition between views.
Problems and Thoughts
For this project particularly, one of the immediate concerns was reorganizing and reimplementing a lot of the bootstrap elements. The template came complete, but I really wanted to customize and remap it to fit my imagination.
This involved lots of time reading through every file and going to the bootstrap documentation to figure out what I needed. I worked hard to really get my ideas on to paper here, even if it meant spending a lot of extra time to figure out a solution to the UI.
Lessons Learned
This project taught me a lot about implementing code into an already structured codebase. At first I had a hard time understanding and going through all of the files within the template, but overtime, between going to the bootstrap docs, and testing things out on a live server, the pieces started to come together.
Additionally, I learned a lot about structure. I realized keeping things commented, and making code readable, was way less of a hassle when sifting through files! Because of this, I take more time to structure code to prevent hiccups in the future.