Self Critique

Phase 4

What did we do well?

We completely remodeled our site for Phase 4. Now that we had almost everything working, we could mainly focus on the aesthetics of our site. We made the Splash Page fullscreen and beautiful. We redesigned our logo and made it larger and made the text inside more legible. We added actual tacos instead of a numerical rating for all our cards. We re-designed our Search page to make it more intuitive and are using tabs instead of divs to categorize our search results. We also put significant time into making our time more mobile-friendly by making everything look appropriate for mobile devices. We had a loading animations for the search pages.

For the backend, we combined three models: Restaurant, Hotel, and Attraction into one model, Place. The three models inherit from the Place model and also have their own unique data. We also refactored all the backend to reduce duplicate code. We scraped and implemented a category, zip code, open hours and distances system. The two most complex systems were category and distance. Category needs to have many-to-many relationship with Place model, and distance needs to have two many-to-one relationships with Place. Now, each place has the distances between it and all other places that are calculated using latitude and longitude stored in the Distance table.

The real question is: what didn't we do well?

What did we learn?

We learned how to use custom-made images to make our site really POP. We learned how to refactor our code and make it modular and portable.

We became familiar with implementing and using relationships in our database, especially one-to-many and many-to-many relationships. We learned how to write queries that involve joining tables and group fields.

What can we do better?

There is a lot that we would do if we had more time.

We would have a search bar in the navigation bar instead of the word "Search". We would make the navigation bar collapse and stay fixed at the top of the page while the user scrolls down - we did not have time to do this.

What puzzles us?

Though our site looks fine on mobile devices, it could use a lot more work - the navigation bar still looks strange on smart phones.

We would also like to save filters and user preferences when users navigate throughout the site - we can use cookies for this, but we didn't put time into implementing these details.