Site Design

[stevenngo]

Hi everyone, I was wondering what program you all use for your websites? And if someone can help me explain the concept behind drupal. Thanks, mucho appreciated

[JohnBoucher]

Drupal is a very powerful CMS (Content Management System). It is a framework that takes care of all the background mechanics of a website and allows you to concentrate on content building.

Drupal is open source, so there is a very large community of users that share designs and modules. There are many online tutorials and demos.

Zappos.com is powered by Drupal.

The downside to any CMS is that the tend to be targeted by link spammers and hackers. Both the good guys and the bad guys have access to the source code. You must keep the code up to date. Don't rely on your host to do it, you need to stay on top of it.

Drupal has a steep learning curve. It can be frustrating to use, until you get used to it. There are many CMS's available. Wordpress, Moveable type, etc

This discussion from WebmasterWorld may help you decide on using Drupal.

[Burmeister #279]

My team uses Notepad and MSPaint with Filezilla for the server stuff =)
However bad our site looks now, the web team is learning html, css, php, and javascript instead of downloading a template or running a program to do it. I personally like Notepad++ because its open-source and has multiple languages and syntax highlighting.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by stevenngo

Hi everyone, I was wondering what program you all use for your websites? And if someone can help me explain the concept behind drupal. Thanks, mucho appreciated

As with everything it depends on what you want it to do and how hard you want to work.

Some people insist on using Notepad, other people install a CMS, yet others use hosted services such as tumblr. Obviously if you want ABSOLUTE control over every aspect you should code the whole site from scratch using notepad or notepad ++ (or any plain text editor) If you just want to have a site up and running and be able to update it without worrying about how I would use either a hosted service or one of the aforementioned CMS.

As for me, I use Visual Studio at work, we do a lot of vbscript (Im actually sad to admit that) At home I use Textmate (very nice Mac text editor) and am trying to learn how to do asp.net and c# using Visual Studio.

Don't be intimidated by people saying that REAL programmers use notepad (or butterflies) A REAL programmer uses the tool which allows them to most efficiently achieve their goals. The first step is defining your goals, do you want a site up quickly and easily? Do you want to learn how the tools work?

[Burmeister #279]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Don't be intimidated by people saying that REAL programmers use notepad (or butterflies) A REAL programmer uses the tool which allows them to most efficiently achieve their goals. The first step is defining your goals, do you want a site up quickly and easily? Do you want to learn how the tools work?

I agree with Andrew here. Do what fits you best: try out as many options as possible and pick what works. there's been several threads on web tools, feel free to use the search function on the forums.

[Vpr99]

What you should use to design and implement your website really depends on
a. The type of site you want
If you want to create your site 100% from scratch (which is a ton of work) I would recommend using the Adobe design suite (if you have money to burn) or otherwise, use Burnmeister's setup of M$ Paint and Notepad.

However, if you want to expend a significantly less amount of effort & time, I would recommend a CMS. Some of the big ones are Drupal, like you mentioned, and Wordpress, which I would recommend. These CMS sites are relatively customizable, but not near the extent that a fully custom site is.

b. (and this is a big one) How much time you are willing to spend
As a general rule, CMS sites take much less time and effort to maintain and create than a site that you made yourself. CMS's tend to facilitate the updating and creating process for you.

Also, I would not recommend tackling any kind of website project without a team of people to help you. This year, I did about 95% of a completely new site by myself, and it just about killed me. I spent probably 300-400 hours on our site, and that was just to get it up and running, not counting updates.


Hope this was helpful
-Eric, 159

[NalaTI]

The best thing about a decent CMS (like Drupal or Joomla) is that it is substantially easy to give multiple people access to various different parts and pieces. And enabling or disabling a feature on the site is usually a matter of a click or two.

For instance perhaps you only want Developers to format the site, but you want Mentors and Team Members to have be able to create content, and you want Moderators to be able to edit everyone's posts, while simultaneously havng both private and public blogs and portions... Writing that is a pain from scratch, but in Drupal takes me about a day and a half to set up a new site from scratch.

We use Drupal on multiple sites. The FTC site (http://www.technoguards.org) is the least advanced of them, but we only have three members. We are able to use the blog feature of Drupal, and taxonomy (categories) to completely set up our engineering notebook. It is all done online. The only time we use paper is when we print it out for competition.

The most advanced is actually the FLL team's (http://www.legoguards.net) because we have different privileges for team members, mentors, parents, webmaster, etc. Plus we have multiple blogs that are only available to team members and above.

[Foster]

Our prior site was PHP based and has a pretty decent blog attachment to it.

We are moving to a wiki based (using mediawiki) site for a number of reasons:

1. Websites are 10% look and 90% content. There was a huge effort to get the look right in the past that took away from getting content in.
2. Anyone on our team can add and edit content. They don't need to have any PHP experience. The wiki markup is much easier.
3. Page linking is easy. It's very easy for us to decide to add a cross link to another page and in seconds to have it done
4. For free we get links at the top of pages to sections that follower farther down in the page.
5. Free searching. Want to know about drive trains, just put drive train in the search box
6. We get forward / back link checking, we can see what pages link to others, and what pages have been ophaned.
7. Anyone can enter content. Yes this is here twice but we are planning that all of the sub-component groups (drive,game,electrical,programming, etc) to update every few days in the build season. The wiki makes it easy for multiple preople to edit the same page.
8. If we decide to change the look and feel then the wiki "skin" takes care of that, I don't need to worry about custom PHP code or CSS code someone may have put on one of their pages.

Granted all of the above points can be managed in a CMS based site, but there is more administrative work that needs to be done.

Foster

[likzuz]

Our school is an Engineering/Design school and as such we have access to Adobe CS3. So when we built our website it was a combination of Dreamweaver CS3, Illustrator and Photoshop.

If you don't have access to Adobe products a great alternative is Notepad (like everyone else has said) but instead of MS paint you can use Gimp http://www.gimp.org/

Gimp is attempts to be a freeware version of photoshop. Granted it's not the best but it's great for what you pay for (nothing!).

[FIRSTgirl675]

I believe that my team uses DreamWeaver.

[NalaTI]

Originally Posted by likzuz

but instead of MS paint you can use Gimp http://www.gimp.org/

Gimp is attempts to be a freeware version of photoshop. Granted it's not the best but it's great for what you pay for (nothing!).

There's a free plugin for Gimp called "Gimpshop" (you can google it) and it skins gimp so it has the same interface as Photoshop (not CS3, but a previous version).

Also, an inexpensive (but not free) program that is really good for web-type graphics development is Paint Shop Pro - IMHO it's the best for the money option.

[Burmeister #279]

Originally Posted by NalaTI

There's a free plugin for Gimp called "Gimpshop" (you can google it) and it skins gimp so it has the same interface as Photoshop (not CS3, but a previous version).

Also, an inexpensive (but not free) program that is really good for web-type graphics development is Paint Shop Pro - IMHO it's the best for the money option.

The Aviary at a.viary.com is also a low cost photoshop alternative and includes a swatch maker, vector editor among other in-dev. products. its really cool, although its more towards daily users not one-time or short-time image editors.

of course all of the free(or cheap)ware tools can be just as good as any other and it depends on the user.

[Chris is me]

Several team sites are done in Wordpress. While technically a blog engine rather than a CMS, the Static Pages feature is adequate for most people's needs, and it's a very powerful blogging tool. It's extendable with plugins and themes, allowing for lots of customization and features, completely free, and you can edit any page from any web browser if you have an account for it. I'm making a prototype site in Wordpress to replace my team's current Frontpage format.

[elemental]

Another photoshop alternative is a souped-up version of MSPaint called Paint.NET It's pretty nice and hasn't given me any trouble.get

[Ranana_Prussy]

Hi there,

I think the background of your site is good the color and design is also nice. If you give red color on top it will look more better.