Background

 My father is a trainer. He teaches selling and life skills to people and organizations all around India. When the covid lockdown hit, he immediately took steps toward taking his entire business online. Now he had previously thought of this and hired a web-developer to do the humongous task of having a website handle sale of online courses and products, but that went awry when he did too little for too much money. Eventually the contract fell apart which left my father without a website. 

He was already quite accustomed to the online era organizing online training sessions and making sales on call and other platforms like whatsapp and facebook; when I approached him with the idea of letting me try to build the rajeshtagore.com web-portal for him. As he had nothing to lose, and neither did I, he gave me a deadline to motivate me and allowed me to have a go at it.

The Problem Statement

I had to build a web-portal which would house all the products and services offered by my father’s company – Leader Factory. This meant the website had to house (apart from the home, about and contact pages) offline products that the customers would order and then have delivered, online products like pdfs and videos that shouldn’t be downloadable or else the customers would just share it amongst themselves, and online-training sessions that my father hosted online that only customers that paid would get access to. I asked for a 2-month time period and immediately got to work.

Important Hurdles

The payment gateway was definitely a huge hurdle. I had never coded anything of the sort before that and I had to look up documentation and learn everything from scratch. Plus, I had to be extra careful everywhere because this involved money, and security was obviously a huge concern.

Another obstacle would be the online products. Offline products are simple enough, customers just order something and it gets added to a list that gets reviewed by employees who perform the rest of the steps required for a delivery. Online products were a whole different matter, the website had to have an “account” page which had a section which showed all the digital products that the customer owned. These had to be embedded in the website in such a way that they should be very hard to pirate/copy/download, lest they lose their value.

Online training sessions were also an obstacle, although not as big as the other mentions. I had to give access to specific zoom meetings only to customers who paid.

Resources