MEAC is a lab at ASU which does biomarker analysis on given samples. People from other universities can also send in their samples and get them tested.
Requirements
A website where users can
- Get information about lab equipment and the types of tests the lab does.
- View pricing of the lab and get a quick estimate of price base on their type of testing and number of samples.
- Place online order, view order status and get results online.
- Receive email updates on order status change.
- A control panel where they can view all past orders, their status and invoices.
and administrator can
- View status of all current and past orders.
- Change status of any order while automatically informing the customer.
- Generate invoice with the ability to apply custom discounts and coupons.
- A ledger to view reports of monthly or annual sales and profits.
and
- The website needs to follow ASU brand guidelines.
- Be accessible.
- Hosted on ASU approved platform.
Solution
Toolbox
- Wordpress: For quickly creating content pages along with Gravity Forms plugin to make a price calculator and ordering forms.
- WooCommerce: For keeping track of all orders and making user control panel.
- Sendgrid: For sending out all transactional emails and getting delivery reports.
- Dompdf: PHP library used to convert HTML invoices to PDF.
- Pantheon: Hosting platform that comes with version control and feature branching used to deploy and host the website.
Implementation
The project took about a month, most of which was spent on research and testing. I wrote about 600 lines of code to implement the functional requirements and around 400 for non-functional requirements like styling the content. Since in a typical ecommerce website an order is shipped out by the store I had to modify the workflow of orders and add new order statuses as appropriate. Since the lab only accepts payment in checks I did not have to add any online payment gateway. I spent most of the time making sure the order workflow made sense for both the administrator and the customer and that transactional emails went out when they were supposed to.