I'm
Team 1124's webmaster (we won Best Website at CTR), and I'll try and give a few good words of advice.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lucasking94
Suggestion for how we go about this?
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I would start by reading the
presentation Jenny linked to - it has a lot of really good information - and by looking at the
2012 Website Award Guidelines (note: don't design your website to win the award, design your website to be a central hub for team resources/communication. With that being said, the award rubric is a good standard to judge your site against to make sure you have everything you need). Then, do some "market research" by looking at
other award winning websites and start to plan out your own site. Once you get some ideas for your own site, start to draw it out on paper. Be sure to think it out thoroughly and flesh out as much of the design as possible before you start writing it.
As for building the actual site, it really depends on what you know and what you're comfortable with - just remember:
content is king. My personal recommendation is to use
PHP for servers-side scripting, and use HTML/Javascript/
JQuery for client side stuff (read: avoid ASP). I'd also recommend that you use a
CMS (
List of PHP CMS's) for managing your content. A few people on my team (myself included) wrote our
own CMS and it's worked great for us, but that's not right for every team. From what I understand, Bluehost accounts have some tools integrated for building your site, and
Wordpress is always a viable option. And as your knowledge builds, you can custom code more and more of your site.
I'd also check out
this post, where I go into a little more detail about writing a good website.
Quote:
Originally Posted by lucasking94
Anywhere we could get a free domain? or cheap?
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The best domain/hosting service I know of is
Bluehost (it's pretty cheap too, $6/month). I work on a few websites on bluehost accounts, (
Team 1124's being one of them) and I've had no problems at all with any of their services.