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Unread 14-03-2011, 18:32
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RyanCesiel RyanCesiel is offline
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Re: Team 871's Site: A Team That Pwns

Quote:
Originally Posted by ernie. View Post
I don't post a lot on Chief Delphi, but this post angered me a bit because it sounded arrogant and a bit selfish.

When I first joined my robotics team I was given the position of webmaster, and just like you I was told I could choose whatever host I saw fit. Being immature, and a bit of a geek I decided to go with Mediatemple, which costed $240/yr. By the time the website was up I realized I completely missed the point of FIRST and stomached the cost of the hosting myself. Don't take advantage of your team.

Now I'm going to be honest you have a lot of work to do on your site. Simply setting up a CMS is far from enough, you need to have content. This site is your team's face to the world and you want to tell them what FIRST is about, what you are about. If you have the budget for the site forgo the ads, there are tons of inexpensive hosting solutions (ex. http://www.nearlyfreespeech.com) you can choose from.
In terms of hosting, you get what you pay for. I agree that you probably shouldn't use something like Mediatemple for a robotics site unless you're hosting other sites on that account; it's overkill. I use a Grid Server account from Mediatemple for hosting my clients and I love it. And, after about 5 minutes of searching on Google, I was able to find a coupon that brought the price down to $160 / year.

For most robotics sites, you could get by with an account at hostmonster.com, bluehost.com, or hostgator.com. Just be careful and do your research when finding a host. It's a very saturated market and there are too many people starting hosting companies that don't have any idea what they're doing.

From what I can tell, it looks like "Team871ROBOTECH" already has hosting from someone. It's usually a good sign when it's a real domain--not something like roboticsteam.freewebs.com.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ernie. View Post
In my opinion the most important code for a website is the navigation. The navigation defines the structure of your site. Having a horizontal navigation and then a separate vertical navigation, both as your root navigation is a terrible idea. If you have horizontal as your main navigation, and a vertical bar as a secondary it would make more sense, but this doesn't seem to be the case.
I disagree. Simbotics had a somewhat similar setup in 2009 when they won the FIRST Championship Best Website. I would venture to say that any navigation is feasible if it is designed properly. I've seen some "wild" designs that are still very effective. I do agree that what he has right now is not designed the best way.
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Last edited by RyanCesiel : 14-03-2011 at 18:34.