Never enough 7/16th Wrenches

About this Website

In the Past

Since winning the Best Website Award of the New York City Regional in 2006, Team 694 was eager to bring our site up to a new technical, professional and informational level. Last year, the site was outfitted with a new dynamic PHP and MYSQL based backend. This allowed less technically inclined team members to easily update the site's content, announcements and calendar events. The site also received a complete redesign to what we hoped was a more 694-themed look. As a result of our efforts, Team 694 received the Website Excellence Award at the end of the 2007 season.

Our New 2008 Site

The Backend

Work on the website started early this year with a larger and more experienced web team. The first major project was a complete redesign of last year's custom backend based on object oriented PHP. The site currently is based around the concept of "modules" which allows significantly more flexibility. One example is how each page's sidebars can be completely customized by editor team members. We even have several custom sideboxes that automatically generate content based on the main content to limit repetitive sections. Also, our pages are all organized in a hierarchy.

Team Communications

We also worked to make this year's site more useful to the team itself. A forum was added early in the year to allow team discussions to continue without the inbox clutter of our traditional e-group. Last year's custom gallery was replaced with the more power opensource Gallery2 which encouraged member use with its improved organization and mass upload, while also being easily integrated with the forum's user base. The calendar was also completely redone so that it would be easier for team members to add and edit events.

Another notable addition is the finance application. As an extension to last year's candy sales, this year's fundraising was monitored via this site. Designated team members could easily update the statistics of any of our members with innovative features such as a CSV (spreadsheet) upload. In addition, individuals could view their own candy sale progress.

New Layout

The site was once again completely redesigned this year. The current layout is based on the same red and white theme, but pursues a more modern, Web 2.0, look. Navigation was limited to only a top bar with javascript based menu animations to allow for more content space. In addition, we payed careful attention to the design of content itself to make end user viewings as pleasant as possible.

Problems? Questions? Comments? - Contact this year's web team

- Webmaster
Gosha Kolyshev - Web Assistant
Mao Hu - Content