For this project, the client needed a way to manage their products that were not meant to be purchased as a storefront like Shopify, but rather in bulk, and a call to action to contact the vendor was the end user action goal. Their old website design seemingly hadn't been changed in a few decades, so we first got to work on a wireframe. The wireframe process was quite lengthy and painful, the team was struggling to decide on the final design direction. They would ask me to build a design, then didn't like it once they saw it, many times over. We eventually landed on a "final" design, but then once we started coding, we again continued to change the designs, which costed time and money.  The end result caused many conflicting design decisions, for example, I wasn't necessarily happy we ended up using a "dark mode" for public visitors, which was hard on the eyes with their dark purple. I had theme mode swapping for signed-in users though, so you can see what that looks like at the end of the final build in the screenshots below; you decide!

The backend we built was the meat of this build and I was proud of what I was able to come up with for them on that front (back). I built a custom CMS backend where an admin could perform CRUD (create, read, update, delete) on products, contact messages, user accounts, and featured homepage products. This CMS was my best yet and was breezy to make adjustments to how the data was collected, updated, and displayed. The React components I created for the "Data Manager" here were agnostic and decoupled effectively. 

I started to feel the constraints from using a CRA (create-react-app) baseline for React.js projects, namely in dynamically rendering products, while maintaining SEO crawling since scripted crawls could pre-load a whole SPA (single page app). This limitation would eventually lead me to start exploring and using the Next.js React framework for my future React web builds.