Report: G.Tube E-commerce Website Development using WordPress

This report outlines the development of G.Tube, an e-commerce website specializing in digital products such as E-Books, Movies, Podcasts, and Music, built on the WordPress platform. The website features a flat-tree structure with a homepage, product categories, about page, login/registration, shopping cart, and a forum for user discussions. Key elements include a header with a logo, menu bar, search function, and shopping cart icon, a body area showcasing products, and a consistent footer with contact and copyright information. The development leveraged WordPress themes, the WooCommerce plugin for e-commerce integration, WPForum for the discussion forum, and various other plugins and built-in features like the editor, theme customizer, media manager, and widget support. The report also references resources used during development, including WordPress documentation, books, and instructional videos.

A
[COMPANY NAME] [Company address]
WORDPRESS WEBSITE FOR
G.TUBE

Contents
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................2
URL and Structure.................................................................................................................................2
Website Features and Elements.............................................................................................................3
WordPress Resources used..................................................................................................................12
References...........................................................................................................................................12

Introduction
The website being developed in this case is named G.Tube. It is an e-commerce based
website. It is being developed on WordPress platform by making use of the latest version.
The version being 4.9. G.Tube is aimed primarily at being an online retailer that specializes
in delivering digital products. These products range from things such as E-Books, Movies,
Podcasts, Music among more. The products are of digital in nature and does not have any
physical counterparts. The website is an alternative version of popular online retailers such as
Amazon, iTunes, Playster among others. However, unlike them, the product catalogue are
entirely digital. The users can browse through the entire site, make searches if they wish to
for the product they want to find and then proceed to purchase the product. Similar to many
other online retailers, users are able to make Card payments as well as check payments
(SIMS, 2018). It will support majority of the cards being circulated worldwide. This is an
important criteria because the website is a digital one and since there is on physical product
being shipped, the digital product may be delivered to customer irrespective of their region
and location(Fernandes and Vidyasagar, 2015). Also, the website currently offers products in
three different categories namely Music, Ebooks and Movies. However, in the future, this
shall be expanded to include many other categories essentially covering the digital goods
within the ecommerce spectrum . The website is being developed on Wordpress platform as
it’s among the most popular and also among the easiet platform for developing websites
(Cabot, 2018).
URL and Structure
The website is hosted on the Cloudaccess service. As a result, there wasn’t any need of
configuring a hosting server and then booking a Domain name, configuring it’s DNS and
then hosting it on the respective server. By making use of CloudAccess, the entire service
becomes plain and simple with one-click. The URL is located at
http://usq1106620.cloudaccess.host/ and the assigned business category is of an E-commerce
outlet delivering digital goods. The website has a flat-tree styled structure starting with
Homepage at the highest level and ending with either a standard page such as ‘About page’ or
a custom page of checkout or forum at the lowest level.

Website Features and Elements
The website is composed of several different pages and elements to make it as close to a
functioning real-world ecommerce website as possible. The website has a simple and clean
layout. This layout is quite common throughout the internet landscape. The layout includes a
Header area, a body area and the footer area. The body area is composed of two sub-sections.
These sections includes the main body and the sidebar. The sidebar is activated only in
certain areas of the website though.
Homepage Header area
This part of the website contains several key elements of the website. This includes the Logo,
the menu bar or the navigational bar, the search button, the header image and the main
categories of the website. In future, as these categories grow, it may be replaced by ‘featured
categories’ of the website. This section also features a shopping cart icon which displays all

of the product a user has in his or her cart. This region of the website serves an important part
and majority of users landing on the website would be seeing this page. The logo doubles up
as a button to return back to the homepage, the search result searches through the products as
well as through the other pages of the site and the menu bar as well as categories are used to
navigate to different areas of the website.
The tree structure
Homepage Body area
Page Section Links
Homepage
About Shop
Music
E-Books
Movies
Account
Details
Login /
Register
Account
Details
Orders
Download
Addresses
Policies
Privacy
Security
Refunds &
Terms
Forum
Main
Discussion
Discuss
Passion
Contact
Legend

This Homepage body area of the website features some of the products being sold on the site
in a horizontal columnar fashion. The products being shown here have some meta
information as well such as the title of the product, its price, the sale value and an add to cart
button for convenient checkout. Apart from that, the products also have an attractive
thumbnail being displayed.
Homepage-Footer area

The footer area remains consistent across all of the website. The footer displays important
information such as contact number, the copyright date, email among other things. It may
also be used to display other important things such as terms and condition, policies etc.
About Page

This is the ‘About page’ of the website and contains information about the background,
history and overview about the company.
Product Category Page

This is the product category page. This displays all the products within a category. The
products can be furthered filtered using the popularity and recency order. Furthermore, the
page also allows for filteration of the product by making use of a Pricing ‘slider’ on the right
sidebar of the page. Apart from that, the sidebar also displays some important inforamtion for
the user.
Login and Registeration Page

This is the Login / Registeration page of the website. A user can either login from this page
or even register a new account from this page. Furthermore, they can make use of the lost
password facility to retrieve a forgotten password.
Shopping Cart and Checkout

This page allows a user to view all the products in his or her shopping cart. From here on, the
user can also continue to browse for further products or proceed to the payment of the
product. Additionally, the user is also shown relevant and / or related products to the chosen
product. Also, if the user possesses a coupon card, they can apply here for a reduction in total
price of the product.
Forum

The forum or the discussion board allows a user to engage in discussions with the staff or
fellow users of the site. The user can make use of the same profile to continue discussions
here and can reply to existing topic or create a new one.

WordPress Components and Features Used
WordPress Themes
I made use of the WordPress theme feature to find the appropriate theme for my website.
Being an advanced and popular CMS platforms, there was already a huge repository of
themes at my disposal to chose from which did not required designing it from scratch
(Majure, 2013).
WordPress Plugin Marketplace
Furthermore, I made use of the WordPress extensive plugin marketplace to install some
plugins that would allow me to create the Website I was looking for. Some of the plugins I
used were WooCommerce for e-commerce integration (Rauland, 2016), WPForum for the
discussion forum, Akismet for spam control and so on.
WordPress Editor
The built-in editor helped a great deal in my work and instead of coding the images, graphics
and texts I wanted to add in HTML, I was simply able to do it in the WYSIWYG styled
editor.
WordPress Theme Customizer
The WordPress theme customizer was also a great option to cusomize the look and feel of the
website to my liking (Rauland, 2016).
WordPress Media Manager
The WordPress media manager allowed me to load, edit and embed the multimedia elements
on the website.
WordPress Menu and Page manager
The WordPress menu and page manager helped me create different pages as well as helped
me design the navigational menus on the website (Sabin-Wilson and Mullenweg, 2018).
Widgets
WordPress provides an additional simple element of embedding widgets on the site which
brings in a host of different functionality to the website such as adding a search button on the
sidebar or a calendar into the footer or even an archived list of pages to the sidebar.

WordPress Resources used
I made use of several resources for making use of the site. The first and foremost resource
was the default documentation for the WordPress. Next, I made use of different books
including Wordpress by Wiley & Sons, WordPress for Dummies, Customizing
Woocommerce themes by Lynda.com and several instructional YouTube videos as well.
References
Cabot, J. (2018). WordPress: A Content Management System to Democratize
Publishing. IEEE Software, 35(3), pp.89-92.
Fernandes, S. and Vidyasagar, A. (2015). Digital Marketing and WordPress. Indian Journal
of Science and Technology, 8(S4), p.61.
Lee, H. (2016). Web Design Methodology for WordPress Site based on WordPress Theme
Customization. The Journal of the Korea Contents Association, 16(2), pp.277-286.
Majure, J. (2013). WordPress. Indianapolis, IN: J. Wiley & Sons.
Rauland, P. (2016). WordPress Ecommerce: WooCommerce. [Carpinteria, Calif.]:
Lynda.com.
Rauland, P. (2016). WordPress: Customizing WooCommerce Themes. [Carpinteria, Calif.]:
Lynda.com.
Sabin-Wilson, L. and Mullenweg, M. (2018). WordPress For Dummies. Somerset: John
Wiley & Sons.
SIMS, L. (2018). BUILDING YOUR ONLINE STORE WITH WORDPRESS AND
WOOCOMMERCE. [S.l.]: APRESS.