Green Basil Thai Restaurant
Details
- Duration: March 2025 - May 2025
- See the finished project here: greenbasilrestaurant.ca
- Role: Lead Developer
- Skills: Svelte, Figma, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Team Members: Ethan Li (UX/UI), Tirsten Lisondra (UX/UI), Max Li (Project Supervisor)
Overview
Green Basil Thai Restaurant is located in Burnaby, BC, and has been a cornerstone of Thai cuisine since 2006. For this project, our team was tasked with redesigning and modernizing their website to appeal to a new generation of customers.
My Goals
In this project, my goal was to develop a website that was both functional and easy to use. Additionally, as we were not given a concrete deadline for the project, I took my time to learn as many new skills as possible, including how to use the UI framework known as Svelte.
Process
Stage 1: Making a Plan
My goal for this project was to approach it with a learn-first mentality. I spent the initial stages of the project reading the Svelte Documentation and familiarizing myself with its features, allowing me to better understand web interactions and explain to the design team how I would implement their ideas.
Stage 2: Development
In the working process, I focused on constantly testing responsiveness, link validity, and interaction design, etc., to achieve the desired results. Additionally, I adopted a rigid schedule to keep myself on task and ensure that progress was always being made.
Stage 3: Reflection
The struggle: As a first-time solo developer working with a lesser-known framework like Svelte, debugging was a tedious process. An instance of this was an issue with the snap-scrolling effect on certain pages, where the overflow margins would be incorrect, or other features would no longer function.
The solution: While the fix ended up being a simple CSS error, an important thing that this taught me was to re-evaluate and come back to a problem with a different mindset. Instead of getting stuck on this one bug, I was able to be productive in other areas and develop separate skills, so that by the time this bug resurfaced to the top of my to-do list, I was ready to tackle it.
Stage 4: Going Forward
What I Would do Different
One of the main things I learned was the importance of web scaffolding. If I were to do this project again, rather than planning along the way, I would first collect all the data I need, organize it into JavaScript files that have the parameters of the data sorted into the groups needed, and then begin the HTML and CSS.
What I Learned
I gained many skills throughout this project, most significantly working within Svelte, a UI framework, for the first time. I learned about the importance of proper scaffolding, the length of the iterative process and debugging, and how to keep a consistent work schedule to keep a team motivated.