When will you start designs for next years sites?

[Compnerd]

Hey i'm interested... When do you start your designs for your 2008 sites?

I will probably start 1-2 months before so I have most of the work done, so i can help actually build the robot


Be sure to post, and let everyone know who voted for what. i forgot to add that to the poll... whoops. oh well

EDIT: Well, the inactivity of not working on something FIRST, is killing me... I have already started...

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by Compnerd

Hey i'm interested... When do you start your designs for your 2008 sites?

I will probably start 1-2 months before so I have most of the work done, so i can help actually build the robot

I try to do most of the learning and heavy coding during the offseason, which is basically from April until December. This summer I taught myself PHP and MySQL, which was quite a rewarding endeavor. And just like any of my mechanical designs, Team 228's website follows the "Design is an Iterative Process" mantra. If I see something that I want fixed, and it's the middle of June, I'll fix it.

On the whole, all my website work for 228 has always been a "side project", just something that I design and code at home. (I'm really a mechie at heart. ) Then again, I wear many hats on our team, including team captain, mechanical design, main base driver, webmaster, pit crew, head of photography and videography, adjunct programmer, and occasional motivational speaker.

Edit: Where's the "All year round" category? I chose "After the competition" because it was the closest.

[GRaduns340]

Unfortunately, I'll be gone next year, so I won't be able to work on the 2008 site unless they ask to help mentor the new guy. Right now I'm planning on trying to get a webmaster for next year picked out and train them up a bit.

This year I did a lot of my hard-core coding stuff during the preseason and did the design elements after the game was announced. Some of my preseason stuff didn't end up in the site, but it was good development experience either way.

[Chris2]

I will probably start to recode our website over the summer and upload it in September. artdutra04, that site looks great for coding the first year.

[pheadxdll]

I'll probably start designing over the summer. Big endeavor but it's worth it. At least I can keep / better code I've already written. Good luck to all you competing for the website award.

[Gigaman2003]

im keeping our current backend, but might be revising the design and add an ajax frontend. our ultimate goal is a full-fledged cms (we're about 50% there) that we can provide for download. it'll take about two years to complete, but is far better than the only other alternative so far.

[team 1094]

i kind of takeing a bold step here in wanting to make my team next year 2008 website. could any one give me some pointers on where to get started or what porgrams you would reckomend. any help would be gratly accipeted.

[GRaduns340]

There's already a thread that goes into some detail about which programs people like and why they like them.

My advice, keep it simple. If this is your first year, don't sweat making everything huge. Just make a site that works and looks good, and add the bells and whistles later.

[Ctrl Alt Delete]

I already started on my team's site for next year. This year, I designed it and we modified it slightly during the build season. Much of the content was the same, but I'm starting on it now so we can have time to rewrite the content. Simple PHP includes will usually suffice for your site. I had to use magpie rss and some complex features to get things to work right.

I second GRaduns340 in his comments. Just get a site up and then you can monkey with it and make it have some pizazz.

[Gigaman2003]

We are nearing completion of SDB, our own database system. It will power our new version of the Scribe CMS (2.0) that we used for our 2007 site. SDB is a flat-file database, but its really fast (somewhere around 70% the speed of mysql, and still being optimized further) and impossible to lock up because of a very innovative triple-level instruction cache and the use of parallel virtual databases. The whole system is open-source and with the recent progress made, i think the CMS can be released for download as Scribe 3.0 for all teams next year. You can check out Scribe 2.0 from the link in my sig.

[team 1094]

Originally Posted by GRaduns340

There's already a thread that goes into some detail about which programs people like and why they like them.

My advice, keep it simple. If this is your first year, don't sweat making everything huge. Just make a site that works and looks good, and add the bells and whistles later.

whats the name of teh thread you are talking about?

[GRaduns340]

I think it's archived now. I can't remember which one it was.

[Pavan Dave]

I'm not a big fan of PHP or mySQL because I haven't needed it. But after this year and FIRST I think I will end up buying a few books and learning. So far though I plan on using PhotoShop to make the site because it works and looks good so why not? But I like learning so this summer will probably be more fun than I anticipate but Senioritis may kick in soon and you know what that means.