Overview
The goal when building MMRambotics.ca was to make a website which uses the latest features offered by modern browsers and still degrade gracefully for those less fortunate. We wanted students and mentors with no programming knowledge to be able to maintain the website’s content, from pages to photos.
Custom Built
Our website is built entirely from scratch. All design, content, and programming is done within the team. We have a back-end panel for team members to easily maintain the website and add new content.
Accessibility
Pages on MMRambotics.ca are tested in a wide range of browsers and devices. We monitor our traffic using Google Analytics and make sure we’re targeting the platforms our site is viewed with.
All pages have a printer and reader-friendly version which strips everything but the content, the reader can choose a colour theme or a different font.
For the Team
Members of the team can easily access information via our team notices area or the team blog. We use a few different services to keep our members (including student’s parents) informed. Team notices sync with Google Calendar and the blog will notify students about new posts.
Impact
Since January 1st 2011, 7206 different people have visited our website, totaling to 29004 page views. Our social media campaigns and search engine optimization helps us receive traffic from all over the world, and not just from fellow FIRSTers.
Technology
We use the latest client side and server side technology to power MMRambotics.ca. Our Linux server uses the Ruby on Rails web framework through Apache. Ruby is an expressive programming language which allows our team to develop quickly and easily deploy new features.
Our backend is done with the excellent Ruby gem active-admin and uses several other open source projects such as Paperclip, rdiscount and geocoder.
The site takes advantage of HTML5 and CSS3 functionality as well as the modern JavaScript framework jQuery. We use a CSS3 extension compiler called Sass to make CSS development a breeze and help us use the latest components from the CSS3 specification.
All code for the website is available on GitHub on our MMRambotics.ca repository.
Integration
Our site uses several external services to create a rich, modern web experience.
- Twitter: tweets are pulled on the client side using Twitter’s REST API
- Google Calendar: team notices can be synced with Google Calendar with a single button click
- Google Maps: Photos and albums can have location data from their venue displayed in an interactive map
- YouTube: Video is pulled directly from YouTube using their JavaScript API
- ShareThis: Social sharing is made easy with services from ShareThis