How I Developed and Deployed gomaganesh.com
Goma Ganesh is a family business that manufactures and supplies products such as jackets, rainwear, bags, and repair services. I wanted to build a proper online presence for the business while also working on something closer to a real production application.
You can view the project live here Live
Choosing the Technology
Instead of building an e-commerce system completely from scratch, I decided to start with an existing open-source platform. This gave me many of the features I would otherwise have had to spend weeks developing, such as product management, categories, customers, orders, and an administration panel.
I chose Bagisto because it is built on Laravel and provides a solid foundation for an e-commerce application. Since I already had experience working with Laravel-based applications and Vue, working with the platform was a practical choice.
My goal was not simply to install the platform and leave it untouched. I wanted to adapt it to the actual needs of Goma Ganesh and make gomaganesh.com feel like a website built for a real local business rather than a generic demo store.
Building the Website
I started by setting up the application and configuring the basic store information, products, categories, and other content required for the business.
From there, I customized the frontend and adjusted the overall experience to fit the business. This included organizing products, improving the presentation of the website, and making important information about the company and its products easy to find.
One thing I found interesting was that the work was not limited to writing code. I also had to think about how an actual customer would use the website.
A technically correct product page is not necessarily a useful product page. Product information needs to be understandable, navigation needs to make sense, and the website needs to work properly across different screen sizes.
Deploying gomaganesh.com
Once the website was ready locally, the next challenge was getting it onto a real hosting environment.
I deployed the application to a cPanel-based hosting server. The application was placed in its own directory on the server, while the appropriate public directory was configured for the domain.
I also had to configure the PHP environment, application settings, database, environment variables, and frontend production build.
The deployment process taught me an important lesson: getting an application to work locally and getting it to work in production are two different problems.
A local development environment hides many things that become important on a real server. File permissions, environment configuration, PHP versions, database credentials, storage links, caching, and web-server configuration all have to be considered.
Working With the Server
After the initial deployment, I used SSH and cPanel to manage the application and troubleshoot issues.
This was useful because I could work directly with the application on the server instead of treating the hosting environment as a black box. I became more comfortable with Linux commands, application directories, logs, permissions, and deployment-related problems.
I also learned that maintaining a production website is an ongoing process. Deploying the first version is only the beginning. Updates, backups, performance, security, and content changes all become part of the job once a real website is online.
What I Learned
The biggest lesson from gomaganesh.com was that building a website for a real business is different from building a project purely for learning.
There are real constraints, real users, and real problems to solve. I had to think about both the software and the business behind it.
Technically, the project gave me practical experience with Laravel-based applications, e-commerce systems, frontend customization, databases, Linux servers, cPanel, SSH, and production deployment.
More importantly, it showed me the value of starting with a proven platform instead of rebuilding every feature from scratch. I could focus my time on customizing the system and solving problems that were actually specific to the business.
gomaganesh.com started as a project to give a family business a better online presence, but it became one of my most useful practical projects because I was responsible for taking it from development to a working production website.