Project: Direct Debit e-commerce website

Summary

Took a static website and converted into an e-commerce website selling services on monthly plans. Payment monthly by having the customer fill in online Direct Debit forms communicated to Smart Debit through their REST API.

http://www.homeserviceplan.co.uk/

Technologies

REST API, PHP, XML, jQuery, HTML5, CSS3

Challenges

The design of the existing website looked great, but it was only static pages. The client wanted customers to be able to click on the existing product adverts on his website, enter all the necessary details then connect to the financial institutions and setup authorisation for monthly payments (UK Direct Debit). So the challenge was to turn the static website into a dynamic site, add input forms and then to submit customer details in a secure transaction to create the direct debit authorisation. To achieve this I re-wrote existing pages in PHP and added many new pages that extended the visual design of the static pages.
One of the unexpected challenges was to retrieve hierarchical XML results from the API, make sense of them and then return them to the user so that they would know if the transaction was successful or whether there was any kind of problem with their banking details.

Length

The project was completed in 3 weeks.

My Role

Development, testing and project management.