Storm: Website Award 2012

Technical Website Design/Showcase
1

Visit our redesigned website at www.stormrobots.org (click FRC).
We used a drupal theme and customized it for what we wanted in both content and design.
Check it out!
Comment and questions are welcome.

2

Before I say anything, I think your website is good. Your homepage is brilliant, your theme is clean, and you have content. I hope you don’t mind some nit-picking:

  • Your opening page (which is great) has a major error: the image of your robot is horizontally flipped (your team number’s backwards) and matted imperfectly.
  • The text in your HTTP 404 error message is too big.
  • Your sponsors list is just text. Ideally, you’d use all the logos you can find.
  • Slight grammar, conventions, etc. errors.
  • You wrote invalid code.

Note: all this is about the FRC sub-site.

3

is this only in internet explorer?

4
5

-We know that the image of the robot is funky, we’ll try to fix it
-thanks for letting us know- we’ll fix is soon
-we’ll get on that
-the website isn’t fully custom coding which limited our ability to fix the coding error, we’re trying to see what we can do

Thanks for the reply! We’ll try to work these kinks out in the coming week.
Thanks for the help!

6

Not quite perfectly. Firefox 10.0.2:

7

Shows the same menu glitch for me in Chrome (Up to date 17.0.963.56).

The site looks good, but having your 404 page as popular content is strange.

8

I would recommend adding in photo logos of your sponsors, and maybe their information (location, telephone number, etc., as well as a link to their websites). Also, just a minor thing, but there’s some sort of typo error/gibberish in the first name listed under the “Boosters” Executive Board Members. Other than that, it looks really good to me, nice work.

9

Beautiful website! Wow, I love the flash!
I did notice a bug, though: after a while, the flash slideshow got tiny, then got big again, then got tiny. I’m using Firefox 9.0.1.

10

Don’t worry; standards-compliant code shouldn’t be your biggest concern (as long as the code works), especially if you’re using a content-management system. As I said, I was nit-picking.

11

Haha yeah we’ve been having problems with those menu links- they’re a pain to fix. But we’ll try our best to get them working again.

The 404 page is ‘popular content’- haha we can’t stop looking at it.

Thanks for all the replies- we’ll try our best to work out all the bugs and make the corrections asap.

If you find anything else, let us know!

12

I like the introduction animation! It has a lot of great content and that little spark a website needs. I love that you the “blog” on the home page as well.

Some of my opinions–
–Not directed at your team but I see a lot of team websites that are made from templates and not a lot of hand coding or deep insight behind the sites which frustrates me because FIRST is about teaching why something works and how to make things better.
–I would recomend throwing together a mobile site as well though. maybe do that one from scratch using jquery mobile or sencha touch?

Here is my teams site if you would like to check it out. It is not as nice as yours in my opinion but it was all done by one student from scratch. The only thing that he did not personally create was the slideshow on the home page.

I don’t mean to be mean or anything cause your site is GREAT especially for how new of a team you guys are but I would like to see more teams creating their sites from scratch in the future, it would make things a little more exciting! :smiley:

13

Hey everyone!

As the person who did the bulk of the website I’ll answer a few things.

  1. We are using Drupal 7.

  2. The intro page is all javascript.

  3. The slideshow is jQuery, and I have no clue how to fix the bug, but I did some cache investigation and it seems to work <i>better</i> now. :frowning:

  4. The dropdowns are a really wacky way to do it in drupal, but the only way to get it to work with the css. It is working mostly now.

  5. Our opening robot is out of focus, and flipped but it was the best we had.

  6. We do have a mobile site!

  7. Wanna tell me next time you do this Om? :wink:

Thanks for all of your feedback, but unfourentally it will all be thrown out next year due to hosting issues. :mad:

@Jake I LOVE the layout! We have custom coded (php) before, check it.

Thanks Again!
BTW Feel free to use ourscouting site:wink:

14

Maybe I’ll have a more useful comment after I refresh that homepage a few more times.

So beautiful.

15

LOL Thanks!