003 : beneficium

Background

Covid has disrupted businesses big and small, but the ones hit the hardest have been small local businesses. People in general don't know much about small businesses as big companies like HM and Amazon have taken over the market. I wanted to create a site that highlighted small businesses and showed people that they can support small shops by purchasing similar items from those who could actually benefit from the sales.

Research

In order to begin the accumulating a list of small businesses I can help, I started to go through the shops around me that I have actually purchased something from before. I wanted my reccommendations to be legitimate in that I can assure that their products are good. After creating a list of shops I then did research to find some of the bigger businesses that get a lot of revenue, but aren't necessarily ethical as I wanted to address alternatives for those shops as well.

Ideating

After analyzing the shops that I found, the main categories for shops I found were:

Clothing. Jewelry. Food. Entertainment.

Wireframing Ideas

I then worked to create a website that gave a fair amount of variety in options for the categories I chose to focus on. I wanted to hone in on some key attributes for the website:

Simple and clean. Informative. Personal.

Final Prototype

I created a simple website that split up the pages by categories and highlighted eight shops in each one. For each shop, a description of what they sell, what can be found in terms of styles/cuisines/likes can be found there, and what similar thing people are more familiar with may sell the things the small business also sells. I also made a part that would have featured shops of the week. There is a section that allows visitors to the site to send in their reccommendations to further expand the collection. As this is a website to help people who have small businesses and support their growth, there's a page that shares resources with visitors to help them start a small business with sufficient support.