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Internet Crew - Progress
At the beginning of the year, when the team divided into crews, we chose a mission that is not inferior to building the robot or writing the program- create a website for the team, that will serve as a display window of the team, through which people can understand the team's essence and vision, become familiar with it's members and follow it's progress during the project. In addition, the site offers information resources to other teams and necessary links. Furthermore, the site contains a forum in which the team members can communicate with themselves, with other teams and with visitors that aren't familiar with FIRST.
At the beginning of the preparation period, our first mission was to plan the site structure of design and content. Our goal was to create a user-friendly design, which will be fun to browse through. On the aspect of content, our goals were to provide information about the team and FIRST, information resources, photo and video gallery, and an active forum that will answer all the needs that a site visitor may have.
The design was our first goal, so we could know which difficulties we are dealing with and what standard of program we aspire.
After planning the site structure, we started learning programming languages. The learning process was very difficult, because we didn't have any previous experience with that subject, and because of the high standard we aspired that required us to learn 4 languages: HTML, CSS, PHP and JS.
As we went through this process, we have documented all the progression of the team. The news system and rich gallery can be evidence to that.
During the learning process we build the website framework, and as we progressed in our programming abilities, we added more complicated elements to the site which provide a more convenient and pleasant user interface system.
The first page we have built was the front page, on which we have dedicated many hours, knowing its design will affect the site's concept. We have decided that the main element we emphasize in it is the news system which allows the user to be updated with the ten most recent articles, read their summaries and have the option of reading the complete article, all of these in a simple interface system.
Afterwards, we continued with the rest of the site pages. In addition to their programming and content, we thought of a unified design for the whole website, for example the banner, the background and the menus at the top of every page. Special pages for instance the news, the galleries and the Community service have special designs to stress their character and make them pleasant to look at because in these pages the visitor spends more time.
In order to allow easy access to new visitors we built navigation pages which provide a friendly atmosphere and allow the user to navigate easily between the pages of the site. Furthermore, we added a searching engine in the site that allows the user to find a specific page in the site.
An additional task we had was to build a website for the Israeli Women Wheelchairs Basketball National Team, which we support during the year. The site is accessible from our home page. We made sure the site answers every need of the team and we designed the page in a unique way.
During the process of writing the articles the whole teem took part. It was nice to see that the members of the other crews, in spite of the build season's pressure, found the time to write articles and contribute the website. This shows how much the site is important for the team.
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