Horizon Heaven – Travel Website
Horizon Heaven was one of the projects I completed recently (Jan 2024).
About the Project:
I was enrolled in the Nobel Learning program where we went over the basic UI/UX rules, WordPress 101, and were given a task to make a website of our choice.
Our team landed on building a travel agency website where we had to provide our customers with services like hotel booking and advice for their trip. It didn’t have to be a working travel guide website, we just had to showcase our abilities to integrate various features, and pages to make the website more dynamic and to work on the overall look of the website.
We were given a whole week to complete the website for the upcoming Expo, where all the teams were to showcase their website before the judges and mentors.
But we know how we are:
For the whole week, no one did anything, two of my teammates got sick and I had my college application so I was focusing my time there.
So, on the Expo day – I could see the panic in our discord chat but still nobody did anything. I had just reached the library that day(a very rare visit). We just had 7 hours till the expo so I sat down with my laptop open, entered the chat like the last-minute messiah, and said,
I will build the website.
But the problem? I have just committed myself to a task of which I had no idea: No idea of using WordPress, No idea of using a theme builder. I have designed a website before but that was 4 years ago using Blogger. I didn’t know how I was gonna complete the entire website in under 7 hours but I knew one thing for sure that, there are plenty of resources nowadays, and if given time anyone can learn literally anything.
So, with about 6 hours in my hand (I spent an hour thinking, talking, and figuring out things). I delved right into building the website. I had WordPress open in one tab and blogs and tutorials on WordPress opened on multiple other tabs.
While building the website, I was amazed by how easy it felt to build it. I was dropping features like counter, images, and testimonials like they were nothing. I could see my coder friends spending hours coding the same thing that I was doing in just mere minutes. My outlook on WordPress changed from a slow, laggy, easily breakable tool to being a superpower for small creators, businesses, and bloggers.
An hour before the expo we had the working website online with every basic thing in place that was required for passing the assessment but we decided to sprinkle it with some added features and functionality. We added new pages and blogs to make the static website feel more dynamic.
Finally, the time to present our website arrived and we were surprised to find out that we were the only team from our course who showed up for the Expo. I mean, just imagine how bad our facilitator would have felt if no one had shown up. Anyways, getting back to the topic. Our presentation went really well. We got really good reactions from the audience and the core team.
With that, the Expo came to an end. My facilitator texted me how proud he felt for us.
After the expo, I looked back at the speed by which I built the website with no idea about a single thing just hours ago. Although it is a very small website, by all means, It gave me the much-needed confidence. The confidence to build my own portfolio website (which you are on) all by myself and not have to rely on people to request or pay them to get it done.