Quick question/poll

[Dustin Shadbolt]

I believe hiring a website designer/programmer would be out of the spirit of FIRST and it would take away the fun of giving it to the programming team to do.

When I competed, I used Wordpress and just wrote some plugins and changed things as I went. Always wanted to hand code something from scratch, but decided against it. Why re-invent the wheel?

[mrnoble]

Originally Posted by Dustin Shadbolt

I believe hiring a website designer/programmer would be out of the spirit of FIRST and it would take away the fun of giving it to the programming team to do

I don't think I can agree with this. There have been so many debates over "the spirit of FIRST" in here over the years, but suffice to say it isn't "students do all the work". We had a student design our t-shirt graphics this year, but had a professional digitize and clean them up, and another professional print them. Not in the "spirit"?

Anyway, we haven't decided yet what approach to take with the website. It depends on our resources; human, financial, and in-kind sponsorships.

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by mrnoble

I don't think I can agree with this. There have been so many debates over "the spirit of FIRST" in here over the years, but suffice to say it isn't "students do all the work".

To be honest, I tend to tune out any post that makes an argument based on the "spirit of FIRST." There have been relatively few good arguments made on that basis.

[HelloRobot]

Our team's school has a web design class, so I talked to the teacher about how to set up a webpage. She suggested I use Weebly, Wordpress, or Wix. We wanted something fairly easy to set up and customize. (We're rookies, and we want to get out there) I looked at different templates on all three sites and compared them. In the end, we decided on Wix. We are finishing up the site this week, and I'll post a link when it's up.

I see most teams (at least, on this thread) use Wordpress, and, from what I've seen here, they all look really really good! I've also seen a team (2614, http://www.marsfirst.org/) use Squarespace, and that looked nice as well.

It's relatively easy to set up one's own team site. Yes, professionally-made sites will look impressive, but keep in mind that your main objective is to give information about your team on a well-organized, well-designed site. Honestly, with so many templates out there, you should be good. Also, mentors and sponsors might help out too if you ask. Don't forget to link other pages (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Youtube, etc.) to your site.

[Sohaib]

Me, and another person on our team made our website through Wordpress. www.Team5036.com

[HelloRobot]

Okay, our site is up now if you want to see it. Again, we used Wix.
http://beardenrobotics.wix.com/teamratchet

[yash101]

GitHub has an amazing offer, the GitHub Student Pack.

It has some really neat stuff that some teams might want to check out.
You can get a free namecheap .me domain name for an year.
You can also get $100 of credit for DigitalOcean, a VPS service. I use their lowest tier to host my website and all of my other servers, and it offers snappy-fast load times and latency running WordPress, and instant loads running my custom web server.
Together, these can be used to build a comprehensive website without putting much into it.

Note that since it is a VPS, all setup is manual. However, Linux is quite trivial to play around with

[snoman]

Student made and in the progress of updating. the Boys http://clbregulators.weebly.com and the Girls http://clbaccelerators.weebly.com

[peirvine]

Our team uses three systems to manage our web presence (besides social media):

1. concrete5 for our main site*
2. Wordpress for our blog
3. myBB for a team forum

Our website and it's subsystems are all student run and we host everything ourselves at our school with our own dedicated server (a sponsor was super nice and let us have one of his old servers).

*concrete5 is just a way for us to manage content so we don't have to teach everyone who wants to edit the website HTML/PHP/CSS. We did have to build the theme that the site runs on and that required a fair amount of PHP/HTML/CSS/MySQL coding that the students did themselves.

[Dustin Shadbolt]

Originally Posted by mrnoble

I don't think I can agree with this. There have been so many debates over "the spirit of FIRST" in here over the years, but suffice to say it isn't "students do all the work". We had a student design our t-shirt graphics this year, but had a professional digitize and clean them up, and another professional print them. Not in the "spirit"?

Anyway, we haven't decided yet what approach to take with the website. It depends on our resources; human, financial, and in-kind sponsorships.

Well a t-shirt design can't really be submitted for an award...that was the angle I was looking at. If you don't have the intention to do that or resources for that matter (been there... only had a 5-member team for two seasons.), then by all means do what you need to do. Sorry if that wasn't clear. Cheers .

[mrnoble]

That's cool, thanks. I thought the website award was eliminated a couple of years ago?

[mrnoble]

Also, as it turned out we had a student step forward to create our website last week and she has made amazing progress already, so one problem solved. Check it out:

www.AngelBotics.org

[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by Dustin Shadbolt

I believe hiring a website designer/programmer would be out of the spirit of FIRST and it would take away the fun of giving it to the programming team to do.

When I competed, I used Wordpress and just wrote some plugins and changed things as I went. Always wanted to hand code something from scratch, but decided against it. Why re-invent the wheel?

I would say that the ethics of, "Is hiring professional help to augment your teams ability." would be a great debate (and feel free to use that as a title). But that debate wouldn't add to the purpose of this particular conversation and it would just derail it.
The purpose of this was to get examples of how other teams did thar bidnizz and not to judge or comment on it. I would hate if the result of this question or poll was that any team felt alienated because of how they operated when all I want is examples of other teams website design.
TlR Method is not of concern here I just wanted to reach out for help and just because someone else said it was against the spirit don't let that make you feel like you will be attacked for how you did things.