How we live-coded a mobile shopping website in under 2 hours, thanks to Google

Yesterday we went along to Google’s offices in Holborn to attend their ‘Full Value of Mobile’ event. They’d asked us to live-code a mobile shopping website in under 2 hours.

Our developers Oyvind and Jun were more than up for the challenge and created not only a mobile website but also an app during the event, and we thought you might be interested in how they did it.

It’s all down to MIGHTYBOT – the software behind our unique mobile platform.

It may sound like a gigantic metal robot, but the Poq Mightybot is actually a back-end syncing service we created. It takes product feeds from retailers and uses them to populate the mobile shopping apps and websites we create. It means that our products are always automatically up-to-date, with no manual data input needed from retailers.

We were lucky enough to have the cooperation of our latest clients ASH Footwear, so while we were at the Google event we created a mobile website and app for their amazing products.

Here’s how it went on the day:

• We got a Google XML product feed from ASH, with information about their products including pricing, availability and images
• Jun plugged the feed into Mightybot, configuring the XML feed and how often it would update from their website
• Mightybot starts running, populating all the ASH data into our admin system
• While Jun is building the app, Oyvind was configuring the mobile website
• Oyvind also designed all the graphics and banners for the app and website front pages
• Jun and Oyvind then went into our admin system to add finishing touches like assigning pictures for categories and uploading the front page banners.

Everything they did during the event was displayed on a huge screen, and after 2 hours of live-coding, the mobile app and website were finished – you can view the website on your mobile at ash.poqstudio.com

Here’s a couple of screenshots from the finished product:

At the event, we asked everyone to look at the site on their phones, and then pulled up the live Google Analytics data to show everyone browsing in real-time! You can see the big spike below:

Huge thanks to Google for inviting us to be part of this event, and to ASH Footwear for being such great new clients. You can see all the presentations and information from the event here, or check out the Full Value of Mobile calculator here – it’s an invaluable resource for online retailers.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how we use product feeds and Mightybot to integrate different sales channels for our clients, you can read more here, or drop us an email at hello@poqstudio.com