As high schoolers in the information age, we can get information almost instantly from any source. From social networking websites like Facebook to Twitter, texting, instant messaging, and blogs, we can get information about almost anything by just turning on a nearby computer. However, many school organizations have not taken advantage of this new medium to improve club communications.

Purpose

At Saints Robotics, we take our website seriously and use it to distribute information between members of the club. As you can see from the main page, we have three main components to our website. First, we have club updates and announcements, posted by Saints Robotics leadership.  This allows members to read about current events in Robotics and keep up with the club even if they have not attended meetings recently. These updates are also emailed to all members automatically. Second, we have articles, allowing for members to read about our philosophy, what we do, and other things they can do to become an active member. Some of the articles, like this one, are designed to help other Robotics teams as well. Lastly, we store all of our photos on this website. This allows us to keep a historical archive of our photos instead of on more user-centric sites such Myspace or Facebook.

How we did it

How did we do it? We used a program called Wordpress. Wordpress is a fairly easy-to-use blogging system that allows people to create and manage websites easily. It’s pretty simple to install  on a server if you have one. If you don’t have a server, contact us and we may be able to help you. Anyways, once you have it installed, you can start modifying it with free templates and plugins from the Wordpress website. On our website, we have the event calendar, post notification, and gallery plugins. These allow us to extend our website’s featureset easily.

Forums

We also use a forum to communicate with other members in the team. This forum is a message board where users can post topics and others can easily reply. We use the MyBB bulltein board to distribute information. MyBB software is free software. Despite being free, it is also a very robust and highly developed tool. There are also alternatives such as PhpBB and Simple Machines Forum (both are also free). If you prefer paid software, you could also try vBulletin but, if your budget is not very big, free software works just as good.

Conclusion

With such a setup, your robotics team will be able to communicate better with club members and have a web presence of your own! Let us know how your website is doing – we’d love help with your website!

If you have any questions, feel free and send an email to the Saints Robotics web officer at joshli@joshtime.com. I would be more than glad to help you.