Website Team

[plnyyanks]

I work on Team 1124's Website and we won Best Website at the CT Regional. I'll try to help as best I can.

Originally Posted by KevinGoneNuts

I want it to be fun for them so how can I make building a website fun?

It would seem to me, that the idea of "fun" usually arises when the student is either really interested in a certain part of the design/building process or if there is some really cool aspect of the website. For example, I like the experience of writing code and seeing my code do something cool/productive. Having that coupled with the idea of building our own custom written CMS really kept me interested in the project, so much that we're probably going to open-source it sometime soon. Also, remember to keep the various students interested as much as possible, as someone without any work to do will most likely not be having fun.

Originally Posted by KevinGoneNuts

What are some tips you would say that would contribute to a successful, award winning website? (Yes I know of the criteria on the first website)

Of course, like you said, to win an award, you need to follow the award criteria and do well on that rubric. As for general advice for making a good website, just make sure to keep it simple and try to keep the website-itself as out of the way as possible. By that I mean to make it feel natural to use, and to not have anything outwardly "annoying" the user and detracts or distracts from the main experience.
As for things you should definitely have, I would make sure you have an event calendar (Google Calendar is good, if you don't want to custom code one), plenty of information about your team and FIRST (see examples here, here, and here), a photo gallery (example), some news about what the team has been up to (example), and some resources for other FIRST teams and your own (i.e. files and documents, programming tutorials, other how-tos, etc). Also, W3's HTML Validator can be a useful tool, as well as the CSS Validator. If you need resources for learning PHP (my recommended scripting language), check out this thread.
Now, from a webmaster's point of view, you can either use a CMS (like Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, a custom built one, or some other one) or you can hard code your own HTML. I'd recommend doing a little research into the difference between them, starting with this thread and this thread. Personally, I like our custom written CMS, but that's not for everybody. You should choose what works best for your situation.

Originally Posted by KevinGoneNuts

How do you or your students run the meetings and do you have a group hierarchy?

I'm probably a little less help here, since our Website Team is a small group (3 people without a knowledgeable mentor), and there's less of a hierarchy to it. We just went off on our own and divided up the work among us and got it done. However, I would suggest that the head mentor (you) and whoever becomes the webmaster (student head) work to divide up responsibilities and come up with goals and responsibilities for the different people involved. Remember to keep it fun and make sure people have something to work on.

Best of luck to you, hope you design a great website. If you need any help or have any other questions, feel free to ask me and I'll do my best to help.