How Do You Make Your Website?

[spydan]

Dreamweaver, Webs, or anything else, how do you plan and create your team's website?

[runneals]

We are using Wordpress because it has a nice backend and is very customizable. Let me know if we can be of assistance to you. PM me if you are in need of a webhost and I can suggest one that hosts non-profits for free.

-David

[Koko Ed]

Our lead website mentor Datwan Dixon wants the kids on the website team to leave the team actually learning something so he has them code every bit of the website in Notepad.

[Mongai]

http://www.team935.com

Our team used to code everything in Notepad. Everything. Now we are using Dreamweaver to construct an entirely new site, but it isn't up yet; the old Notepad site is still up. Our goal for launch is January 5th and we are hoping to meet that deadline!

[Andrew Zeller]

Redbird Robotics transitioned to using Weebly last year and it has allowed us to produce a nice site. Weebly hosts for free and is very simple to use, however once you learn about web design it can get annoying.

From my personal experience with WordPress, I would consider it to be much more customizable and still very easy to setup and launch. The themes and plugins for WordPress are numerous and its blogging features lend themselves well to writing a build season blog while still maintaining a nice site.

runneals, could you also PM the free webhosts for non-profits? Thanks.

[R.C.]

http://www.team1323.com/site/index.php

We use Joomla and customized/wrote custom code off of existing templates.

-RC

[Tom Line]

Notepad++

I absolutely do not want the kids using any sort of developer environment that shields them from actually understanding all the code inside the web page.

Once I get them through the hand-coding, they can pick up the other stuff later. Then they'll never be stuck because their developer software won't let them do something.

It does limit you. Wordpress has plugins that would take an experienced individual quite a while to write. I'll accept the limitation if it means the kids actually learn how it works under the hood.

[dcarr]

Just because WordPress and other CMS's are easy to use out of the box doesn't mean they can't be customized extensively and the students won't understand the functionality of the code.

Have them develop a custom theme (or heavily modify an existing one), and instead of using plugins for certain functionality, create it from scratch.

When it comes to web design, why re-invent the wheel?

[CalTran]

We use a combination of Dreamweaver, Wordpress, and custom code.
Dreamweaver we use for the main parts of the website and general content. Wordpress is used for our blog, as it's easier to upload content than re-upload an entire page of the website, as well as the possibility of mobile uploads. The custom code is used for our team's personal website where we keep our directory, team information blasts, and daily check in.

As said by David, why re-invent the wheel? I may be wrong, but I can't say that I've ever heard of a web design place that would require hard code.

[MichaelBick]

I really like the combination of wordpress and a custom theme. It's really easy to program your own theme(html, css, and php are super easy to learn) and you learn so much. Plus you get a website customized to your team.

[josesantos]

Originally Posted by dcarr

Just because WordPress and other CMS's are easy to use out of the box doesn't mean they can't be customized extensively and the students won't understand the functionality of the code.

Have them develop a custom theme (or heavily modify an existing one), and instead of using plugins for certain functionality, create it from scratch.

When it comes to web design, why re-invent the wheel?

That's how we did it. Using WordPress as a CMS makes it easy for everyone to make pages on our site, but we wrote a custom theme in Notepad++/Sublime Text.

[rachelholladay]

I can add my team into the "Notepad++ we hand code every bit" camp. I like having complete control...

[Dan Richardson]

We mostly use Wordpress on the backend. We find their themes to be elegant and simple to use. Not having time to develop custom themes or plugins hasn't seemed to limit us. It allows us to focus on the content. But the customization tools are there if desired.

Two different themes: iR3creative.com and robotin3days.com

[clacourt]

I custom code everything in Aptana.

[AllieR2012]

Do y'all have any suggestions for a small team with very little website building experience? Our girls who knew html graduated and we don't have the resources or team numbers to build an entire site from scratch.

We are currently in the process of switching our site to google sites, which has it's limitations. Is there a site creator (hopefully free) that's as easy as google sites but with more opportunities for customization?