Simba 4 Cars: A car sales man web application built with a headless API based cms. • Kudzai Mabika • Portfolio • Developer

Simba 4 Cars

A car sales man web application built with a headless API based cms.

Role

I had the opportunity to be the developer and designer for this project. I was responsible for defining and proposing a user flow, UI/UX wireframes, and developing the final web application working with a Contentful CMS and React.

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Overview

Simba4Cars is a car salesman platform that helps potential customers easily view the latest available vehicles. I was tasked by Simba Nyakuedzwa, to work on the re-development and re-designing of his platform. I researched different car salesman websites to create a modern experience of the potential clients.

Problem

The old Simba4Cars website was a WordPress "off the shelf" template/theme that did not meet the specific needs for Simba4Cars. A WordPress website presents a plethora of issues like a gradually increasing hosting price and security is dependent on the publisher. These are issues that a modern stack can solve.

The UI/UX of the website was old as most of the information was not clearly defined to provide a concise use flow. The UI design made the website score low in some Lighthouse scores like Performance, Accessibility, and Best Practices. Contact information was not available to convert an interested visitor into a customer.

Stack.

Gatsby.Js
Contentful CMS
Algolia Search
Netlify Deployment & Web hooks.

Process

To decide how to proceed, we focused on 4 specific issues:

Clean UI
Better SEO
Cheap & Secure Hosting.
Improve user flow.

I used public surveys and interviewed some of my friends by having them use the old website, to understand from first hand the pain points and put together the main elements to illustrate a user context. Thanks to the research and the discoveries of some of my friends, I built the mockups and tested it on some of my friends , this helped me develop and create a functional website.

Timeline

This project took about three months, more or less, with the first month dedicated to research, design, and UI/UX redesigns and the last months dedicated to development. To meet milestones, I took some time on the best approach to rebuilding the website. I started by inventorying features, interface elements, and interaction. I built wireframes and mockups to make the development process easier.

Conclusion

I enjoy developing web applications that have real-world impact and the learning experience from building such projects is always beneficial. Personally, this was a significant journey where I had the opportunity to discover new knowledge, be curious, and successfully ship my first freelance project.

Initially, I was intimidated as there is not a lot of information on how to build such web applications from scratch using the JamStack. I had no initial idea about car sales websites, but the curiosity and the love to build, got me to understand the parts of the industry. For now, I enjoy maintaining and improving the performance of the website but, I think the project could be cool as a PaaS or SaaS product for interested parties similar to the product offered by Prop Data.