2006 was the team's second year of having a full featured website. Unfortunately he 2005 website was lost so we had to start it over completely from scratch. The 2006 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 archive 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 their 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

• In its 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 discussion 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
• Macromedia Flash MX
• Macromedia Dreamweaver
• Notepad (as a HTML code editor)
• Adobe Photoshop CS2
• Windows Movie Maker (For Website Video)
• Google Video Uploader
• Microsoft PowerPoint (We used this to show off our product to sponsors)