[MattyCincinnati]

We've run across a big question mark in this whole "student designed" issue. What if you use a program that helps you build websites? We all know angelfire can put you online in about 5 minutes with crappy gifs and some text, but if that's the extent of your skill, should you be penalized for your dependence on the software, or awarded for your involvement in the website competition. We assumed that using certain software that actually complies your page using templates would be cheating, ie phpBB and vBulletin. However, we only use the software for our forums pages, and those forums are for use by team members only, so we assumed that if we only linked to the forums, that it would be okay to include it in our submission. However, there will be sites that are made from modified tutorials and pieces of other sites, as well as sites that are built from the ground up from templates that Adobe supplies with it's software. I think even FrontPage uses templates. So the question remains: SOFTWARE? How much can we use without breaking rules? Gracious professionalism will find the internet a cold and heartless place, I know I do. There's no solid way to enforce a web rules doctrine, because for every person that makes a fool proof system, there are 5 people with a loophole. Perhaps the solution is this: The judges should be picked for a keen eye in honest, intuitive, and only student ORIGINAL pages. No one should be considered for the award if their page has been bought or built by checking boxes on a Wizard. This is our personal feeling, and anyone who has tried to actually conquer javascript or make a flash animation from scratch will agree.