Michigan Team Websites

[aspiece]

Weebly is a great platform for a team to start with. Truck Town Thunder started with a Weebly site and just this year upgraded to Wordpress. http://www.trucktownthunder.com/

Content Management Systems are definitely the way to go for teams. We would be happy to meet with your team (online) and discuss some of the lessons we have learned and how we manage our site now.

Questions I started out asking myself as a Website Mentor were:

1. How do I get students to create content?
2. How much web programming should the team focus on for students?
3. How do I include mulitple students helping to keep the site content up to date?
4. What should put on the site?
5. How can I use the site to help with team communication?

Team websites that have inspired us are the following:

• Simbotics http://www.simbotics.org/
• Adambots http://www.adambots.com/
• Holy Cows http://team1538.com/
• Enginerds http://www.team2337.com/ (Great Example of a Weebly site)
• Team Rush http://www.teamrush27.net/
• and many more...

This past year we were able to get help from the web design company to help us get up and running quickly and make a smooth transition. This was extremely helpful and we are now revisiting how we reintegrate our team management system into the new process. It is going to take some intense training on the Wordpress interface.

You have made a great start here and I look forward to new releases of the site as you start to add more content.

One suggestion: Look at as many other team sites as you can, analyze them, look at placement, content, colors, etc. Learn from other teams and you will see things you miss along the way. Remember this is a great community to learn from. We all want to share and we all want everyone to be successful.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Go Truck!