Overview
Our current website is our newest one as well. Designed in late September of 2011 but not revealed until a month later, it uses JavaScript to animate many things and keep the attention of the user. There are effects everywhere on the site, from the animated menu's on the nav bar, to to animated scrolling up on the Back to Top button in the footer. It uses CSS3 to style the website. It is organized and effective in almost all browsers. The width of the website is 920px throughout the entire website (excluding the photo albums). It uses graphically appealing headers for each page to tell you what page you're on and what if offers. All images are compressed for website meaning that they are very small in size. This greatly helps the load speed of the website.
JavaScript Features
Some of the features of this website are the animated slideshow in the homepage which goes through some of our upcoming events or news with graphics, an animated menu, our very own embedded photo album which loads very fast, as well as our embedded video gallery showcasing our videos, our brand new comments feature which lets you comment on articles or pages, and the Back to Top scrolling animation, which is useful if you have the scroll down a massive page and you don't want to scroll back up. All these features are powered by JavaScript and can be found throughout the internet for free. It is an amazing substitute for Adobe Flash and is smaller and easier to load and can be viewed by almost anyone.
CSS3
A huge part of this website is designed with CSS3. It is the "newest" thing in website design. It lets you do things that you couldn't do two years ago with websites. It is pretty easy to learn once you get the hang of it, and the things you can do with it are amazing. It is a great alternative to using images which can really make your website load slower depending on your internet.
Forums
Our forums was one the original things that came with our website when it was made back in 2010. It has undergone extreme changes. We use vBulletin Forums which is a professional forums software. It is not free, unfortunately, but it is top-of-the-line. It has many great security features, and it is easy to use. Users can customize their profiles to their likings and they can post, edit, and reply to threads on the forums. It also features an arcade full of games for those that just want to compete against others and have fun. We post many useful information and resources here so check it out.
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Blog
Our YouTube Channel was made a few months after our first website in 2010. We uploaded videos of our moments in Robotics to it. In 2011 we made our official Facebook, Twitter and Blog accounts and we've been using them ever since. Our Facebook is our main account where most of us post information and we can ask our mentors about things. On our Twitter, we tweet what we've done, and our upcoming events, while in our Blog we post many useful news articles which can be accessed very easily. All these accounts can be accessed by clicking on the logo's below the header.
Text Updates
New to us is our text updates. It was started last year in 2011. Students submitted their phone numbers to our Gmail account to receive text updates. Using Gmail, we send weekly updates to every team member who submitted their phone number to us. This allowed us to be certain people knew correct times for our meetings and events, and when meetings or events were cancelled.
Upcoming Updates
Some new things we are working on are an improved Mobile Version of our website which can be accessed when you go to www.eastridgerobotics.org on a iPhone, iPod, iPad or Android device. We are also working on a better user experience when you visit our page.
Many new things might come to stay tuned!
Our Website History
