Panthrobotics has a new website.

[MysterE]

Hi all,

Panthrobotics has finally gotten its own domain name and website. Please feel free to take a look and provide commentary.

http://www.panthrobotics.org

Thanks again!

[stundt1]

one thing when you click to zoom into a picture in the home screen the news pops up in the bottom corner.


I love the flash content


Good work Panthrobotics!!!!!

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by stundt1

I love the flash content

However fancy flash content is, it's not universally supported (cough, Apple iOS devices), users need to download an external plugin, it's not very handicap user friendly, search engines can't crawl flash (so that hurts your sites searchability via engines), and it slows your site down (if I remember some article I read on the subject).

Also, with web 2.0 technology (HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript), you can do most, if not all, things that Flash can do. It might be a little more work on the coder's end, but I think it's well worth it. In my mind, using Flash for an entire site just isn't justified.

Now, regarding your website specifically, it seems you have most of the necessary information and it looks very nice. Just if you get time, I'd move away from Flash. Other than that, good work.

[daniel_dsouza]

Originally Posted by stundt1

I love the flash content

I couldn't agree more.

My favorite page was the robots page. I don't think I have ever seen a site where the robots move!

Keep up the great work!

[MysterE]

Yeah -

It was an initial debate in regards to the flash content. The eventual goal is to have a non-flash mirror of the site itself. Part of the reason that we chose flash was because of the originality of it.

Oh - and if you navigate to the site with a cell-phone it should pull up our cell version.

[BJC]

I really like the website. My biggest thing was that all of the motion that was going on as I scrolled over stuff and clicked on different tabs was starting to give me a headache. Maybe if you took out some of the sliding in of pictures it would be a little bit easier on the eyes.

Also, no big deal but I noticed that in the robot section you spelled your wheel type for the 2011 season "Mercanum" instead of "mecanum". (Great robot page by the way!)

[~Cory~]

sexy.


The loading graphic seems very similar to www.wix.com Any chance they are helping out a bit?

[MysterE]

::Grins::

My team has not yet reached the point of having a dedicated webpage design team. So - I found them a solution that allowed my non-technical individuals to help work through the design process. Wix helped a lot with that. :-) My next goal is to find people interested in taking what we've designed here and moving it to a CSS/HTML5 (perhaps) site.

But for now, it could at least contend for the Website award.

[trilogy2826]

2826 Wave Robotics used Wix for a while and for all the aforementioned reasons of slowness and incompatibility, we had a lot of heartburn with using this tool.

In the end, the 2 nails in the coffin for wix were:
1. Little to no team member support. Basically we couldn't do anything with individual permissions, uploads and downloads or anything that made this a tool that the team could use to help manage projects or products.
2. We cannot use wix and submit for any website awards. Even though wix can be student created and maintained, we were told by FIRST that we could not qualify.

That being said, we ended up coding our own site in Dreamweaver (www.waverobotics.com), but we still struggle with maintainability and functions to make it exactly what we want.

We have just recently been training on Joomla as our main CMS and overall, it is fantastic, though a bit hard to learn if you are used to thinking in HTML terms. One word of caution on Joomla hosting: Heed all the warnings on GoDaddy being extremely slow. On average, we are getting 5-7 seconds of load time per page.

Overall, Wix is very cool looking, but make sure the sparkle doesn't outdo the substance

[trilogy2826]

Originally Posted by trilogy2826

2. We cannot use wix and submit for any website awards. Even though wix can be student created and maintained, we were told by FIRST that we could not qualify.

Clarification: According to FIRST, we would not qualify for the regional or Championship Website award, but it would be possible to qualify for the Excellence Award