Inspiration
Seeing the firsthand effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we realized that there is a grey area between wanting to travel and support small business while also keeping the community safe. Known for their tourism, some cities, especially their locally-owned businesses, aren’t used to financial difficulties that the pandemic causes. We decided to create a website that was able to bring a bit of joy and sense of community through e-travel or as we like to call it vTours! vTours provides a platform where individuals can still explore their favorite towns in a safe manner while supporting local businesses. It’s the perfect combination of fulfilling travel dreams while staying safe!
What it does
vTours provides an easy to use website to indulge users in travel from the safety of their homes. We have included several maps that mimic the typical travel experience, allowing the user to click on popular tourism destinations and navigate to their prospective websites. We also included a directory to allow users to continue exploring virtually on their own.
How I built it
We used React js to build a website from the bottom up. We also utilized web scraping to extract data from a website and incorporate it in our code.
Challenges I ran into
None of us had much web development experience, so getting the website up and running was an achievement in and of itself. We learned React through this process, a library we had not utilized before. We also incorporated web scraping techniques, which required the use of python and beautiful soup, two other things we were not familiar with.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are proud to have been able to come together to build a website having little website development experience, with the shared goal of helping others during the pandemic. Above all, we expanded our knowledge and learned something new.
What I learned
Having no experience in web programming, this was a way for our group to become familiar with how web programming works such as how to link pages. One of our team members also worked on a web scraping tool which was also a new technique that none of us had used in practice before.
What's next for vTours
VTours could expand to highlighting other cities to help others experience other places virtually, keeping everyone safe at home. This would include adding more pins to the map on our website’s homepage and including links to other city pages also equipped with interactive maps. We would also like to add more interactive features such as a search bar to search specific businesses in the directory as well as eventually implementing a machine learning algorithm to provide suggestions based on recent searches on the website.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.