I was wondering how many teams had student created websites vs websites created through other means be it CMS systems, or even hired website builders.
I built my team’s website when I was a freshman student nearly 2 years ago: http://www.team4819.com
The back-end is a bit hackish, as it runs on google’s app engine, but it’s hosted for free.
I just finished building a 100% HTML5 homepage.
I have a WordPress blog, and two 100% HTML5 applications, which you can feel free to play around it. I also use a custom web server to serve my web applications as I use a poll method for communications between the browser and the server.
I have the source for everything except my blog and homepage at GitHub
Not 100% done but one of our programmers with the help of the team for content put this together this year.
I redesigned our website this year after our team decided the old design wasn’t exactly what we wanted. It was made with a WordPress theme, but a bunch of customization (CSS, etc) was added to make it look just right. The link is in my signature for any interested.
The teams that I have been on have all preferred a content manager. That way less time is spent on creating the site and more time is spent on creating content.
We created ours through Wordpress and some CSS tinkering. www.Team5036.com
For the past 10 years, team 1507 has always had a student built website. Each year the students would come up with a new design and hard code the html and css for the site. After the removal of the website award in 2013 and declining student interest, we decided that hard coding a new website each year was not worth the effort
We are currently about to begin the migration to a content management system. Hopefully a CMS will be able to cut down on site maintenance and allow us to focus more on the content.
You can view our current website at warlocks1507.com
Team 624’s website was built from scratch by students on the team. We had just updated it in 2013, you can see it at www.team624.org.
Our robotics team website (http://www.firebears.org/) uses wordpress. Marketing sub-team is usually in charge of updating it, but the programming team and the mentors sometimes do stuff on it.
Like some other teams here, we use WordPress. The websote has remained the same for several years, and I don’t think any students work on it.
However, there has been a little bit of discussion of creating a new student-created website from pure HTML/CSS, though I’m not sure if that will happen.
I believe hiring a website designer/programmer would be out of the spirit of FIRST and it would take away the fun of giving it to the programming team to do.
When I competed, I used Wordpress and just wrote some plugins and changed things as I went. Always wanted to hand code something from scratch, but decided against it. Why re-invent the wheel? 
I don’t think I can agree with this. There have been so many debates over “the spirit of FIRST” in here over the years, but suffice to say it isn’t “students do all the work”. We had a student design our t-shirt graphics this year, but had a professional digitize and clean them up, and another professional print them. Not in the “spirit”?
Anyway, we haven’t decided yet what approach to take with the website. It depends on our resources; human, financial, and in-kind sponsorships.
To be honest, I tend to tune out any post that makes an argument based on the “spirit of FIRST.” There have been relatively few good arguments made on that basis.
Our team’s school has a web design class, so I talked to the teacher about how to set up a webpage. She suggested I use Weebly, Wordpress, or Wix. We wanted something fairly easy to set up and customize. (We’re rookies, and we want to get out there) I looked at different templates on all three sites and compared them. In the end, we decided on Wix. We are finishing up the site this week, and I’ll post a link when it’s up.
I see most teams (at least, on this thread) use Wordpress, and, from what I’ve seen here, they all look really really good! I’ve also seen a team (2614, http://www.marsfirst.org/) use Squarespace, and that looked nice as well.
It’s relatively easy to set up one’s own team site. Yes, professionally-made sites will look impressive, but keep in mind that your main objective is to give information about your team on a well-organized, well-designed site. Honestly, with so many templates out there, you should be good. Also, mentors and sponsors might help out too if you ask. Don’t forget to link other pages (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Youtube, etc.) to your site.
I would say that the ethics of, “Is hiring professional help to augment your teams ability.” would be a great debate (and feel free to use that as a title). But that debate wouldn’t add to the purpose of this particular conversation and it would just derail it.
The purpose of this was to get examples of how other teams did thar bidnizz and not to judge or comment on it. I would hate if the result of this question or poll was that any team felt alienated because of how they operated when all I want is examples of other teams website design.
Tl:DR Method is not of concern here I just wanted to reach out for help and just because someone else said it was against the spirit don’t let that make you feel like you will be attacked for how you did things.
Me, and another person on our team made our website through Wordpress. www.Team5036.com
Okay, our site is up now if you want to see it. Again, we used Wix.
GitHub has an amazing offer, the GitHub Student Pack.
It has some really neat stuff that some teams might want to check out.
You can get a free namecheap .me domain name for an year.
You can also get $100 of credit for DigitalOcean, a VPS service. I use their lowest tier to host my website and all of my other servers, and it offers snappy-fast load times and latency running WordPress, and instant loads running my custom web server.
Together, these can be used to build a comprehensive website without putting much into it.
Note that since it is a VPS, all setup is manual. However, Linux is quite trivial to play around with 
Student made and in the progress of updating. the Boys http://clbregulators.weebly.com and the Girls http://clbaccelerators.weebly.com