MensFashionForLess.com by Michael
Amazon
I created Men's Fashion for Less in year 2010 with my dear friend Gloria Lee. You can see popular men's clothes from name brands like American Eagle Outfitters,
H&M, Zara, Express,
G By Guess, Club Monaco, and more brands!
Want to see fashionable T-shirts by color or style? No problem. On Men's Fashion for Less you can search for Men's Blue T-shirts, Men's V-neck T-shirts, anything you want. The skyp is the limit because the website is backed by a custom search engine!
Here's the story behind creating this website. I used to not care about how I dressed at all. In fact most of my clothes were old clothes from relatives because I simply didn't care. One day I got inspired by my friend Gloria who encouraged me to buy a black leather jacket we saw on the street.
I did and wore it to work the next day and received overwhelming compliments! What a GREAT feeling!
Then I realized not many websites discussed men's clothing at all. Most fashion sites revolve around women but it doesn't take a genius to know that men need to dress as well!
Dressing well helps increase their confidence and popularity and therefore enhances every aspect of their lives! So I bought the domain mensfashionforless.com and thought I'd read articles about men's clothing and fashion.
Then I can mix and match men's clothes to create stylish outfits and put them all on the website, teaching guys how to match a blue shirt, a green T-shirt, a white jacket, etc.
The technology behind this website is nothing simple. First I had to take all these photos and touch them up so they look nice. I use Google's Picasa to do that. Picasa is amazing in that it can make your photos look like they were shot at a professional studio!
The website is built using the following technologies:
- PHP: PHP is the backbone of the website. THe PHP engine generates all the dynamic content of the website using the Yii Framework which I will introduce next.
- The Yii Framework: I needed a framework because pure PHP can be messy and confusing and time consuming. I surveyed all the popular frameworks including CakepHP, Zend Framework, Symphony. And I realized the Yii framework, an MVC framework, is relatively new and seem to be the most popular and have the best performance. Therefore I picked it.
The fun thing is that I needed to do a small hack to make my website work. I didn't need conventional controller/action functionality in MVC frameworks such as CakePHP and Yii; I simply need to route all the requests to one single controller and one single action, and that action handles everything.
I take advantage of the caching functionality it comes with and it's very fast. In the future as I am enhancing the website I'll be relying on more of its popular features.
Also Yii provides an ORM tool which is extremely useful in manipulating your data models. - jQuery: The Javascript library jQuery is one of the most popular libraries. It has a super rich plugins that do all kinds of visual effects which were only possible with Flash before.
I use jQuery to generate the interesting left menu, the top navigation menu, the rolling photo gallery, and so on. I just love jQuery! - Sphinx: This website is powered by Sphinx, one of the most powerful and popular search engines next to Apache Lucene.
When you search on Men's Fashion for Less I use Sphinx to perform the search to get the results. Then I present them in a friendly webpage for you to see! - MySQL: Being one of the most SQL engines MySQL is naturally my choice of database.
Needlessly to say I use MySQL to store all the data of the website including every piece of clothing, content associated with every item, every outfit, etc. - Nginx: I use Nginx as the web server and file server for Men's Fashion for Less.
I don't have a preference over what web server to use, but my website host happens to have Nginx and so I use it. I like the simplicity of its configuration's syntax and its optimal performance. - SVN: I use SVN to do source control for all the files posted on Men's Fashion for Less.
- Facebook Plugins: As you can see I use FB Like plugin, FB Share plugin, and FB comment plugin on Men's Fashion for Less.
