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