Team 1094's New Website

I have worked on rebuilding my teams website from the ground up during the summer, I am still working out a few issues, and implementing a few things like linking the footer links.
as a side note, I will be adding a videos & photos page soon, I am working on a design for that now, just have to fix some bugs in it.

For now, tell me what you think, and what should be improved & or changed.

http://frc1094.org/

Looks good! You should also include a video of Olivia driving your bot off the bridge at CTTD.

Overall, a very clean design. Works well for the user and isn’t too complex.

I am working on a video montage of all her driving accidents lol.

Great job! It’s pretty clean.

Some suggestions of things to work on…

  • You could make your blog the same theme as your website. (I like Wordpress myself.)
  • The ‘Categories’ for the links on the side could be re-named
  • Some of the links need to be fixed (specifically in the footer)
  • I would add the page links on the link page into a drop down menu when you hover over the main topic
  • Remove the ipnoid.com image at the bottom.
  • Your ‘Resources’ page could be kind of cleaned up
  • Put spacing b/w sponsors logos on your sponsors page by using <br> as line breaks. Check with Boeing and some of the other companies about their brand identity, as I know that one of our sponsors is critical of how their logo is used and it’s important to follow their rules on usage of their logos.
  • Remove ‘Dean’s Homework’, ‘Light Bulbs’, and ‘Demonstrations’ links until you have completed their pages.
  • Make pages for all of your robots! Those robots that you left out are sad :slight_smile: Also make sure that all of the links on your page work, as I clicked a broken one.
  • I also just noticed that the RSS link didn’t work either.
  • Where does your contact form go? I suggest you register for a google apps account (or similar) and post your emails up there as well.

BTW, what are you using as a backend? It kind of looks like you are using a Wordpress theme without the Wordpress backend.

I hope this gives you some ideas for improvements, but I would have to say other then these VERY minor issues, I really like your design because it’s so simple and clean. Feel free to email me & look at our website if you have any questions - [email protected]

I am not using any backtheme, everything was created by me using photoshop and notepad++, I did php coding/testing at home also using notepad++ and xampp.
Every robot will have its own page, i am still gathering info on the others.
the blog will be changed entirly soon.
I am staying away from dropdown menus until I find a way to create a nice elegant look to the buttons we have.

ipnoid is a security program I run, because we had trouble with security earlier.

after filling out a contacts form the info goes into a database, and will be emailed to our monitoring email, which I check every day nearly once an hour. Its just a nice clean easy way to get the forms finished.

Also refering back to the CMS comment, I do not use any CMS on this website, i built it for the other students on the team wanting to learn web design to do all html, css and php coding so that later on they can create a cms but not use a pre built one, i am currently working on a custom cms for that purpose.

If you are concerned about security, I suggest you use Cloudflare. It will save you bandwidth, while protecting your website (and it’s very cool :slight_smile:

If you plan on passing the CMS down once you leave great, but Wordpress is nice because there is support in place once I leave at the end of this year, someone else can pick it up completely and I know it will continue to be updated with the latest security patches. But more power to you for re-creating the wheel :slight_smile: It’s a GREAT learning experience

I have looked into Cloudflare before also thanks for the info. but because I will become a mentor after I graduate, I will be able to teach students more hard code that way they have an edge in the web design world. if you can create your own templates and have a custom CMS that works on anything, you are set. even if you can create your own template and use wordpress or something to keep it going, that is my overall goal so that when a company looks at what the student has created they dont see a premade wordpress template or a premade drupal template.