How Do You Make Your Website?

[Andrew Zeller]

Redbird Robotics transitioned to using Weebly last year and it has allowed us to produce a nice site. Weebly hosts for free and is very simple to use, however once you learn about web design it can get annoying.

From my personal experience with WordPress, I would consider it to be much more customizable and still very easy to setup and launch. The themes and plugins for WordPress are numerous and its blogging features lend themselves well to writing a build season blog while still maintaining a nice site.

runneals, could you also PM the free webhosts for non-profits? Thanks.

[R.C.]

http://www.team1323.com/site/index.php

We use Joomla and customized/wrote custom code off of existing templates.

-RC

[Tom Line]

Notepad++

I absolutely do not want the kids using any sort of developer environment that shields them from actually understanding all the code inside the web page.

Once I get them through the hand-coding, they can pick up the other stuff later. Then they'll never be stuck because their developer software won't let them do something.

It does limit you. Wordpress has plugins that would take an experienced individual quite a while to write. I'll accept the limitation if it means the kids actually learn how it works under the hood.

[dcarr]

Just because WordPress and other CMS's are easy to use out of the box doesn't mean they can't be customized extensively and the students won't understand the functionality of the code.

Have them develop a custom theme (or heavily modify an existing one), and instead of using plugins for certain functionality, create it from scratch.

When it comes to web design, why re-invent the wheel?

[CalTran]

We use a combination of Dreamweaver, Wordpress, and custom code.
Dreamweaver we use for the main parts of the website and general content. Wordpress is used for our blog, as it's easier to upload content than re-upload an entire page of the website, as well as the possibility of mobile uploads. The custom code is used for our team's personal website where we keep our directory, team information blasts, and daily check in.

As said by David, why re-invent the wheel? I may be wrong, but I can't say that I've ever heard of a web design place that would require hard code.

[MichaelBick]

I really like the combination of wordpress and a custom theme. It's really easy to program your own theme(html, css, and php are super easy to learn) and you learn so much. Plus you get a website customized to your team.

[josesantos]

Originally Posted by dcarr

Just because WordPress and other CMS's are easy to use out of the box doesn't mean they can't be customized extensively and the students won't understand the functionality of the code.

Have them develop a custom theme (or heavily modify an existing one), and instead of using plugins for certain functionality, create it from scratch.

When it comes to web design, why re-invent the wheel?

That's how we did it. Using WordPress as a CMS makes it easy for everyone to make pages on our site, but we wrote a custom theme in Notepad++/Sublime Text.

[rachelholladay]

I can add my team into the "Notepad++ we hand code every bit" camp. I like having complete control...

[Dan Richardson]

We mostly use Wordpress on the backend. We find their themes to be elegant and simple to use. Not having time to develop custom themes or plugins hasn't seemed to limit us. It allows us to focus on the content. But the customization tools are there if desired.

Two different themes: iR3creative.com and robotin3days.com

[MAldridge]

we use a joomla backend with template; my site everything is done in nano.

[raphaelchang]

Our team coded a full-featured CMS from scratch using PHP and MySQL. Because we also use our website to manage membership and handle team events, we thought it would be useful to have a unified interface to perform all those tasks. Our CMS features a theming system, a posts/pages system, and a media gallery system (similar to WordPress). It can also manage events, orders, and member lists.

[ace94x]

I agree with your mentors 100%
My mentors first wanted me to create a site using joomla or wordpress I told them no, probable a bad idea but the end result has been great, I am the only web developer on my team, I have created our website over the summer (still tweaking it) and I used 100% custom code, there are the few lines of code from google maps and from google analytics, but that is it, even the images were created by my using GIMP, my suggestion use Notepad++ it is perfect for creating websites from scratch, then use a free host like 000webhost for testing in a locked folder then once it is complete upload to your teams site, now because most sites vary like ours did you may have to change things, like I had to, but never just jump into it using a CMS or a WYSIWYG, I am working on a custom CMS now for my teams website (Menu based) hoping to work with all customs sites in the future. Once I finish it I will post it on chief delphi, I just started it so I am not far along though. the CMS will require you to already have a site created though, because custom sites are better than template sites.

[reymac]

We use Wordpress with a some custom CSS. Wordpress really helps with content management.

www.Edison73.com

[bvisness]

Our team uses Concrete5 for our CMS. It lets you base an entire theme off one template page, which we custom-designed. Concrete5 literally lets you just specify which tags inside your page should be editable by the CMS.

That said, I personally would like to transition to Wordpress...I have found the ease of use and flexibility to be beyond any other CMS I have used.

[jwallace15]

I think our team used Joomla for our current website... However, we're switching to Weebly for this season. I have personal experience with Weebly and think it's a great website-creating tool!