About This Website | AdamBots Team 245

Student Designed

This website is not a theme or template. The website was designed completely from scratch by the Marketing & Website Team in Adobe Photoshop CS5. Each and every section on the website was designed prior to coding to ensure a solid user interface. This design is the 6th version of the website for the 2011 through 2013 FIRST seasons.

Top of Page

Original, Organized Code

After designing our website in Adobe Photoshop CS5, we seperated the design into approximately 20-30 images and then remapped them together utilizing HTML5 and CSS. The HTML5 and CSS framework of this site is hand-typed by students to ensure no extra code is added. We also abide by the standards of W3C because our website’s code is valid HTML5 Doctype and CSS2 code. Type “adambots.com” in the W3C validator and you will see that our site contains valid HTML5 and CSS. We have also coded our website to be handicap accessible; it includes a text version of every non-textual object. According to CynthiaSays.com, our website passes the 508 Standards as a website accessible to blind users.

Top of Page

Cross-Browser Compatible

The AdamBots’ website is compatible in Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera. With advances in web browser technology, we decided to discontinue support for Internet Explorer 6 like many prominent websites already have such as YouTube and Yahoo! The website is also fully usable in most handheld or mobile devices such as iPhones, iPods, Blackberries, and many others.

Top of Page

Spreading FIRST Through Our Website

Our website has helped spread the message since its inception in 2005. We promote our website around the community, at competitions, and online in order to spread not only our message, but the message of FIRST. We have reached a large audience from all parts of the world. According to Google (since November 2007), 30,359 different people have visited our site from 150 different countries or territories (as of February 16th, 2012).

Top of Page

Engaging Multimedia

We have included a variety of features on our website to help provide a fluid experience for the visitor. We have included a picture slideshow on the homepage, while videos on the FIRST and OCCRA pages help explain the content in a more engaging way. You cannot forget about our Media Gallery, which has about 6058 pictures in 130 different galleries along with 5 videos.

Top of Page

Keeping Our Team Members Informed

We maintain a Team Calendar on our website to keep team members informed. The calendar includes times and dates for full team meetings, sub-team meetings, and competition days. Locations and specifics of events are also posted as it gets closer to the event.

Top of Page

All Members Contribute

Our website allows any of our team members to contribute or edit the website. We believe the more people that contribute, the more complete our website is. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we have heavily modified the open-source WordPress blogging platform into a Content Management System (CMS). We use WordPress only to allow all members of our team to edit the website rather than having one or two webmasters. Using WordPress does not necessarily mean the code of this website is less student-created. It means that we have expanded the amount of authors to better our website.