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.