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2006 is Team 578's second year having a full featured website. Last year's website was lost forever unfortunately so we had to start it over completely from scratch. This year's new website team worked extremely hard to make the website bigger and better than ever.
Website Team Vision
Future Team 578 Members
- It is important to archieve all images and videos of the Fairport Robotics Team in action so future teams can view them. The website is the perfect place to do this.
Other Teams
- This website will allow people to find out about FIRST and the Fairport First Team. This website will also be helpful for students who are looking to start a new team and provide other teams with resources for thier FIRST Team.
Not Overwhelming
- We had a lot of focus on the front page. Our goal was not to clutter the front page with news articles, and paragraphs of information. But it was to give you a simple description about the team, a link to a page with information about FIRST, and a easy navigation bar at the top of the page. We did not want people to feel overwhelmed by the front page.
- We know that there are still some people in the world without access to high speed internet. So our webpage is made to load fast and smoothly.
Other steps taken when developing the website.
- We had hands-on experience with purchasing a website host; and in this case a new website domain name. This was the first time many of us had actual done this.
- In it's first 2 months on the internet fairportfirst.com had over 4,000 hits. We
 achieved the mass amount of traffic by spreading the word on foot with posters and presentations, using google video to host videos as well as providing a link back to our website, and bringing it up on major disscussion boards (ex. The Chief Delphi Website).
- Without any mentors (completely student driven) the website team was able to develop this website completely from scratch. So overall every sentence, graphic, and media content was made by members of Team 578. No pre-made theme was used.
- HTML was used as well as Javascript.
- The top banner used iconography to simplify navigation.
- The website team learned how to submit the website to search engines.
- We used a dot com name over a dot org name because it's easier to remember.
- The front page banner was changed a total of 10 times.
- All though all websites needed to be completed prior to the competition, it hasn't stopped Team 578 from updating it and making it better.
- The website was optimized for all browsers. So there's no need for a user to download a special browser just to view our website.
Software Used
The website team learned how to use the following web development software which is used extensively by professional website developers.
- Macromedia Fireworks 2004
- Marcromedia Flash MX
- Macromedia Dreamweaver
- Notepad (as a HTML code editor)
- Adobe Photoshop CS2
- Windows Movie Maker (For Website Video)
- Google Video Uploader
- Microsoft Powerpoint (When we show off our product to sponsors)
At the FIRST competition in Boston Team 578 took home the award for best website design. |
