About Our Website

History of Our Website

During our first season we had a website hosted on Weebly, which worked well for beginners, but our team wanted to escape its limitations. So, using basic Dreamweaver and HTML skills, the team created the first iteration of our website, with its own domain. It was a good first attempt, but nowhere near a final product. Then, the team started over using a Twitter Bootstrap template. This allowed the team to create a new website with a better layout. The website served the team well for a long time, but several usability, maintainability and SEO issues arose, stemming from both Twitter Bootstrap and from the site’s use of an <iframe> as a form of client-side includes (which means that the site’s navigation bar didn’t have to be copied and pasted between files). The <iframe> prevented the site from being indexed by Google effectively, and Twitter Bootstrap introduced excessive complexity along with a lot of 3rd-party code that team members constantly had to look up the documentation for. Finally, the <iframe> also caused annoyances such as double scrollbars on the page due to the way it was implemented, as well as preventing people from being able to directly link to pages on the site.

In order to fix these problems, as well as create a fresh look for the new season, the site was once again overhauled from the ground up at the start of the 2013-2014 season.

2013-2014 Site

The new site was developed entirely in-house, using no 3rd-party code (not even jQuery). This allows the site’s codebase to be far smaller, because only functionality that is actually used is included. Also, the new site uses PHP for server-side includes, which removes the need for an <iframe>, as well as removing all of the SEO and usability problems associated with the <iframe>. Finally, the site is designed to maintain our brand image and content from the old site, while incorporating a new, more compact design that leaves more room for content and scales well on different screen widths.

SSI (Server Side Includes) are directives that are placed in HTML pages, and evaluated on the server while the pages are being served. They let you add dynamically generated content to an existing HTML page, without having to serve the entire page via a CGI program, or other dynamic technology -Apache

2014-2015 Updates

For the new season, we have made some significant updates to the site. In particular, we made major improvements to the site’s mobile compatibility. We added a responsive layout, which causes the site to rearrange itself to fit smaller screens like smartphones and tablets. Most of the icons and logos have been replaced with new SVG images, which scale for high-resolution screens.

The site still uses almost no 3rd-party code. The only 3rd-party library we’ve added has been Snabbt.js, a small MIT-licensed JavaScript library that we use for some of our animations. We also have begun using the icons from the Elegant Icon Font, which we’re also using under the MIT License. However, we’re using the SVG versions of all of the icons, with some colors changed, because icon fonts can have problems.

The websites that we really liked the design of are listed below. Use these along with our own website as inspiration for yours.

  • Raider Robotix
  • Gear it forward
  • Adam Bots
  • The MIT License (MIT)

    Copyright (c) 2015 Daniel Lundin

    Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

    The MIT License (MIT)

    Copyright (c) 2013 Elegant Themes, Inc.

    Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.