Website Creation Advice

[Dale]

If you have a Mac at your disposal, you can throw together a simple, georgous site very quickly with iWeb. No programming or html is required...all drag and drop. It's part of the iLife suite so it's likely already on the machine. It's not going to impress the tech-savy folks and probably won't win the website award because it's intentionally simple but it will get the job done.

Many teams have also used Wordpress. You can start out with a simple blog-based site with no special skills and then grow into something fancier all within Wordpress.

[pSYeNCe]

The first thing is to decide whether you want to get a basic website up, go with a CMS (Content Management System) or use plain old HTML (or PHP, or whatever you'd like to use).

NickE mentioned Google Sites. That's definitely a solution if you just want to get a website up without hassle, but I can't imagine it'll score many points with the judges (though it's not something I'm certain of), and it's not a super-great solution. It can definitely make a website, though, so if you really can't do much hardcore website work this may be the way to go.

If you want to use a CMS (Content Management System), your main choices (though there are many more!) are WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla!. Wordpress is probably the simplest, and it will let you create a very decent-looking website if you put some time into it. CMS simplifies editing and updating your website, but I'm not sure what FIRST judges thing of websites with this sort of framework (our team has never used one). I'd have a hard time thinking they'd look down on it, since these are used in many, many modern websites today and are very relevant in the web design world (and FIRST is all about preparing for that sort of thing).

The alternative is to hand-code a site, which for you will actually be hand-coding since you lack Dreamweaver or Expression. (I can't say anything about KompoZer, since I use Dreamweaver for all of my sites, but you might as well try it.)

If you have the time to actually learn some code, I suggest you visit w3schools.com. They have an excellent guide to HTML and CSS, the building blocks of websites, along with other important components like PHP and JavaScript.

In any case, you'll need to design graphics for the site, which means you need a graphics editing program. I used Paint.NET before purchasing Photoshop, and if you learn to use it you can do a fair amount with it. I've also heard very good things about GIMP, another free image editor, which is more popular than Paint.NET (I'm actually not sure why I never used it).

Finally, if your team has some money to invest in web design software, and you're going to use it, I recommend checking out Adobe's Web Premium Student and Teacher suite; it's insanely cheap compared to the standard versions (this is how I afforded mine), but it is still around $450, which I know is pretty steep for a robotics team when you have other costs to worry about. At any rate, the option's always there if you have the money.

I'll follow this thread for a while to answer your questions, and I'm sure if I can't answer it someone else here will be able

Good luck this season!
-pSYeNCe

[Scott L.]

You might be able to get microsoft expression free through a program like dreamspark or MSDNAA, if your school is eligible.

My most complicated web page I've designed has maybe 30 lines of hand coding, the rest are all generated by using the graphical editor, and choosing settings from dropdown lists. You can get code for embedded chat from Meebo, and just drop it in thne code view where you want the chta box to appear, maybe have to tweak a size setting if you want it to be a specific size.

[Garret]

There are several ways to do this, but it really depends on what you want to have on your website.

If you want to have a simple but really good-looking website with minimal effort and almost no coding use the content management system. I like Joomla because of all of the plugins, modules, extensions, templates and so on.

My team's website is still being worked but we use a forum software to run the website and act as a sort-of content management system. The program is MyBB and seems to work well enough but the website is still in development.

You might be able to get microsoft expression free through a program like dreamspark or MSDNAA, if your school is eligible.

My most complicated web page I've designed has maybe 30 lines of hand coding, the rest are all generated by using the graphical editor, and choosing settings from dropdown lists. You can get code for embedded chat from Meebo, and just drop it in thne code view where you want the chta box to appear, maybe have to tweak a size setting if you want it to be a specific size.

Yes.

If your school is eligible use them to get the Expression Studio or Microsoft SharePoint Designer. If there is a community college in you can probably get the software by taking a class that participates in the MSDN. That's how I got my copies of a lot of software.

[pSYeNCe]

Originally Posted by Scott L.

You might be able to get microsoft expression free through a program like dreamspark or MSDNAA, if your school is eligible.

Ah I forgot about Dreamspark! I asked our tech coordinator to sign the school up but for some reason it fell through... I think MS never emailed us back and it was forgotten

If you're interested then you can find more information here.

[Dustin Shadbolt]

Definitely get expression or something like that. MSDNAA has it for free and it's a great tool to mess with. If you know any college students / alumni from your team contact them and see if they can get you hooked up with it. If you can't get a hold of anyone, let me know I might be able to help.