Welcome to the new team228.org, the official website of Gus Robotics Team 228. As you browse around, you will see an all-student made, all-student designed, all-student maintained website. You will see a website full of pictures, but not too many, one with bright graphics and behind the scenes peeks at Gus Robotics. But what actually went into the design of this website?

     First off, it's FIRST. If it was not for FIRST robotics, I would not be typing this, nor would I even remotely consider being a webmaster. My favorite part of the team is construction and drive team, but since we're a smaller team than average, and being without a webmaster, I stepped up to the plate. After a few days, I realized that I wasn't that bad at it, and my artistic skills came in handy designing all the graphics for this site, since I was starting from scratch for the 2004-2005 season.

     I started using Microsoft Publisher 2003 to play around with layout ideas. After toying with a few designs, this one came out on top. So with only two weeks until the deadline of February 19, I loaded Microsoft FrontPage 2003 on my computer and got to work. After a few days of teaching myself the program, I was rolling again. Within two weeks, this entire website was created. A month later at the UTC New England Regional, our website won the Best Website Award.

      The website looked good and worked well in all browsers. But the code generated by the WYSIWYG FrontPage editor was ugly and chock full of useless code. So in June 2005, I began the most recent overhaul of our website. This time, all the pages were hand-coded to W3C standards without using tables for the layout. I tweaked the layout of the homepage, and several other pages in the process. When I first created this website, I made sure to keep several points in mind. Here are some of my main goals that I had in mind:

     A bright, clean website with plenty of orange (our official team color) and bright graphics, but not overkill. I know that many sites have dark backgrounds and light text, which is fine for on screen viewing, but your choice of colors is limited, since most colors would not have a high enough contrast to be easily visible against black (including Gus Orange).

     Just the right amount of pictures. As they all say, sometimes there is just too much of a good thing. And to have a website with many gigabytes of pictures would be nice, but for an average person looking around, trying to get a feel for what the team does, might feel daunted if they see 17 pages worth of pictures for one particular event or build week. On the flip side, some websites have very few pictures, and that is often discouraging to people if they can't find what they are looking for.

     Multimedia. Static websites are good and all, but usually a little action is better. Watching the robot in action is much more interesting than seeing pictures. With this in mind, the MultiMedia section of this website is full of dozens upon dozens of videos.

     Interesting content. Some websites contain only plain, run-of-the-mill stuff. What fun is that? Why not learn where the name Gus came from, or about Dean Kamen's other inventions, or some of our behind-the-scenes goofs that have happened at Gus? Now were talking...good juicy stuff.

     Make it Easy to find what you are looking for. On top of every page, you see a search bar, as well as links to all parts of this site. Using the power of Google, you can search our entire site, and find precisely what you are looking for in a split second and the click of a mouse.

     Explain what FIRST is. Yes, although you and I may not believe it, there are many people who do not know what FIRST or Gus Team 228 are. These include students that may be interested, or other teachers, or potential sponsors, or anyone for that matter. That is why I made the What'sGus page to best explain what our team is, what we do, and what FIRST is. For the more people learn about FIRST, the better it is, which is also the reason behind our PromoteFIRST pages.

     Easy Navigation through the site. That is why you see a links bar at the top of this page, as well as the fact that this site will always resize itself automatically to best fit your screen. And, as websites with frames can be cool, they permanently take up real estate on your screen. And for people with small screens, that can be a problem. This site was designed to get the most bang for you buck and try to get the most content possible onto your screen.

     Show the spirit and imagery of our team. At Gus Team 228, we have a well-known reputation for our "Contagious Enthusiasm" in New England. Our team won the 2004 Imagery Award and the 2002 DaimlerChrysler Team Spirit Awards as well as awards in the community (like in the Daffodil Parade) for our spirit and imagery. Bright color and graphics, exciting pictures, and actively promoting FIRST all carry over from our overall team attitude and spirit.

     But these weren't the only things that I had in mind. Those of you with smaller screen sizes and different browsers, don't worry. Although this website was originally designed to be best viewed in 1024 x 768 pixel screens or larger, that is now changed. This site now automatically resizes itself to best fit your screen, so no more of that annoying sideways scrolling!

     Upon designing this site, I knew that there are hundreds of pre-made PHP-based website templates available, where $35 (or more) bucks can have all the graphics and layout done for you. That seemed almost too easy, but I wanted this site to be unique, different, original and student-made. Everything (except the team forums - see next paragraph) has all been created from scratch, without pre-made templates. I wanted this site to be truly student done.

     Even since I first saw ChiefDelphi, I wanted team forums for our site. It really would have helped to have them back when we had our trial EDU Competition. In the search for creating forums, I came across phpBB. A totally free, publicly supported set of web forums. This is the only part of this site that wasn't 100% originally student work. I could have made some sort of simple forum on my own, but the thought of hackers and security risks persuaded me to pick a forum that already had all the kinks worked out. After some thought, I decided that I would use the phpBB forums, although I did some of my own modifications. See our team forums for yourself:

     >>TeamForums

     I have been to several hundred FIRST team websites this year, prior to designing this one, to get a feeling for what works and what doesn't. And although FIRST provides links to all teams through their site, most people find it faster to use a search engine like Google or AskJeeves. And I often use this to find other team's websites. But so often I'll type in "team xxxx" (where "xxxx" is their team number) in Google and I can't find their website. So when designing this site, I made sure that if you type "Gus Robotics", "Gus 228", or "team 228" in a search engine that our website would be the first result every time. After trying it multiple times, it is.

     It is often said that necessity is the mother of all innovation, and this holds true to this site. I probably would not have created this site, or even considered being webmaster, had we not found ourselves without a webmaster (or webmistriss). FIRST is all about opening new doorways in life. Because of FIRST, I have had the wonderful opportunity to try something entirely new.   

Arthur Dutra

Web Team, Construction, and Drive Team