Site Design

[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