Is it allowed (Website Design/Award Question)

[jonathan lall]

Originally Posted by roboticsguy1988

I know this is an old post i just happened to be exploring... but i have to disagree once again. While yes a CMS makes it easier to manage say content. You still spend LOTS + TONS of time working on the site. Take my teams website. It uses mambo. But i have spent forever modifying, making things work right, adding special stuff, managing it, modifying images, editing code, i could go on and on.

I think that while building a site form the ground up and coding it all yourself is great. I think you can learn a lot more from learning how to modify, fix, add, etc. by using a CMS.

I also think that using a CMS or a template is more of a real world thing these days than building a site form nothing. I mean think about it, do you really think places hard code everything... I think they would have some sort of CMS (GUI) way of editing stuff.

But yes i DO believe you should know the code HTML, PHP, Java script, etc. before using a CMS.

Thats my opinion, just throwing it out there, if someone wants to catch it and form it into there own opinion thats fine, otherwise it can land in a little puddle, lol.

I'm not sure if the above is really contrary to what I said.

Originally Posted by jonathan lall

I wouldn't suggest you go that way if your goal is to bring an award home (which it is), because such sites often have little creative effort on the part of students, and when they actually do, FIRST judges don't notice it.

I'd like however, to add that most people (including website judges) would reject your contention that one could "learn a lot more" from chiefly filling in the blanks of a CMS. I'm not going to sugar-coat this: I see no hypothetical situation in which that could possibly occur. And even if one could learn more from a CMS, that's not what the website is being judged on. Bottom line is I'm presenting the viewpoint website judges have gone by in the past. And it makes sense; it is by its very nature difficult to create a website which adds to the FIRST experience by using a CMS. Is it impossible? Nope, but it's very difficult, and for good reason. After all, how can a site be distinguished of it's not distinguishable?

On the bright side, it's clear from a glance that you've made a better effort than many CMS'd sites in FIRST. So best of luck with the award.

[Chris_Elston]

I guess my take on this topic is this.

I like to prepare my kids for the "real" world. A real world website developer now-a-days will not just be coding in html only or hard code everything. My students need to understand how the backend works. How to SSH into the web server and issue command line commands. How to use MySQL, and edit the database. How to install php scripts, and fix Unix permissions to run dynamic scripts. Installing something like a CMS is a value add that just coding a static HTML site will not give to my students. This is purely my opinion and my aggressive approach in teaching them how it’s going to be life after college.

However in the sprit of FIRST, the judging is based on "CONTENT". If you code an html site "Static" and have good content, then yes you deserve to be praised. Using a CMS or not is irrelevant based on the scoring sheet of FIRST judging. They are looking at your content, layout, and navigation. Things that are important in a basic website REGARDLESS how or what tools you used to make it.

From my perspective, if I had to choose today to hire a student to be a webmaster for me, I'd choose a student that is experienced in PHP installation, Linux, MySQL, and DNS administration. That's because that what's important to me and my business model. Others might not need that in a student or employee but I view this as a value add that a student can bring when interviewing for a system administrator position within a company.

Again though....CONTENT is the key to winning the judges over, not what technology you used to create it. Anyone can have a crappy website if they don't put it together right or get their act together.

The best thing to do in my opinion is print out the scoring sheet in the AWARDS section. Give that scoring sheet to several people. NON-TECHNICAL people you know. People you go to church with, your grand parents and ask them to score you. You’ll find a wide range of opinions about what you’ve done. If you can’t design a site to score high marks with those people, then you’ve got some work to do to impress the judges.

Good luck with whatever you guys decide.

Here is my success story; In 1999 I started a website mrplc.com which is a “bought” forum board software much like chief delphi. Today mrplc.com is a 16,000 member site with almost a 1 million page impressions a month. People keep coming back because the “content” is dynamic. Technically a forum board is somewhat a CMS system. Are CMS systems bad? I dunno, but it makes it easier to manage the content that is put forth in the website, and people like this organization in a website, or they probably wouldn’t be coming back.

Another aspect of engineering is being effective in engineering a project. I use new technology tools every day to speed up the design process of machines that I design. Hence why I believe FIRST released “EasyC” to all the teams. What a wonderful tool to make a team more efficient in their software design. Efficiency in my work place is #1. The more efficient our engineering department is, the more money we make for the company. If that means spending $10,000 for a piece of software that makes our job easier, then that is what we will do. A recent example is spending $7,000 for AutoCad Electrical in our department. This one piece of software improved electrical design in my department by 47%. That’s truly amazing. Would I go back to doing the electrical design the old way and drawing each symbol the “Hard Code” way…probably not….I even made an AutoCad Electrical menu system pre-AutoCad Electrical to help, but it was time to find a faster "easier" way. I hope someday, you’ll share your success stories when your in the work field.

Autocad menu thingy I made for free download, sorry you have to register to get it though..forum rules...

[jonathan lall]

Originally Posted by chakorules

I like to prepare my kids for the "real" world. A real world website developer now-a-days will not just be coding in html only or hard code everything. My students need to understand how the backend works. How to SSH into the web server and issue command line commands. How to use MySQL, and edit the database. How to install php scripts, and fix Unix permissions to run dynamic scripts. Installing something like a CMS is a value add that just coding a static HTML site will not give to my students. This is purely my opinion and my aggressive approach in teaching them how it’s going to be life after college.

However in the sprit of FIRST, the judging is based on "CONTENT". If you code an html site "Static" and have good content, then yes you deserve to be praised. Using a CMS or not is irrelevant based on the scoring sheet of FIRST judging. They are looking at your content, layout, and navigation. Things that are important in a basic website REGARDLESS how or what tools you used to make it.

To address chakorules', comments I understand where he's coming from -- the ultimate goal here of course is to build marketable skills -- although as he pointed out, the question we are framing here is with regard specifically to the Website Award. To add to what he said, we should note that after all, no backend technology in and of itself is a sufficient condition for this ultimate goal, or for that matter sufficient for an objectively "good" (i.e. irrespective of FIRST's slightly i'll-conceived criteria) website. In my experience, the non-CMS websites that win -- and most of the winners were in fact non-CMS, or at least cleverly disguised the fact that they used a premade backend -- created their own backend and used every one of the technologies above that you listed, only they often made it themselves (for those that don't believe me, there are lists of the winners available). This is why I contended earlier that making a site by my lonely with no CMS taught me much more (and I'm sure many other webmasters would agree), and also raised the bar for what I would achieve. Also, not having to decipher someone else's programming in order to make my site do what I wanted (but rather programming it myself) catalyzed this creative process.

Of course, since content (especially with regard to FIRST goals), navigation, and design are key, only the second of the three criteria are neccesarily met by a CMS; the intrinsic problem from a development perspective is that this pre-made system does not encourage any individuality or creativity, because the site already "works" out of the box. Bottom line is that CMS'd sites are not neccesarily bad, only that using a CMS tends to cause us web designers to set the bar lower. Speaking form personal experience, I don't think we would have had a standout website if I'd decided to go that route. Couple that with the fact that website judges historically haven't been big on blatantly-CMS'd sites, and I'd say that's a pretty substantial reason to not go that way. That was my reasoning anyway when I made our team's site back in the day.

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by jonathan lall

To address chakorules', comments I understand where he's coming from -- the ultimate goal here of course is to build marketable skills -- although as he pointed out, the question we are framing here is with regard specifically to the Website Award. To add to what he said, we should note that after all, no backend technology in and of itself is a sufficient condition for this ultimate goal, or for that matter sufficient for an objectively "good" (i.e. irrespective of FIRST's slightly i'll-conceived criteria) website. In my experience, the non-CMS websites that win -- and most of the winners were in fact non-CMS, or at least cleverly disguised the fact that they used a premade backend -- created their own backend and used every one of the technologies above that you listed, only they often made it themselves (for those that don't believe me, there are lists of the winners available). This is why I contended earlier that making a site by my lonely with no CMS taught me much more (and I'm sure many other webmasters would agree), and also raised the bar for what I would achieve. Also, not having to decipher someone else's programming in order to make my site do what I wanted (but rather programming it myself) catalyzed this creative process.

I would have to agree with this one hundred percent. When I made the first version of my team's website a year ago, I used the WYSIWYG editor in FrontPage 2003. Then, after reaching my limits in that, I decided to totally redo the entire website by hard-coding the entire thing. It is only after one hand-codes over thirty thousand lines of XHTML, CSS, and Javascript that one learns and appreciates what PHP/ASP can do.