Building & Maintaining a Team Website

Why a website still matters

Social media is rented land; your website is the home base you own. Sponsors, judges, prospective members, and other teams all check it. A current, professional site signals a serious, sustainable program.

Choosing a platform

• Wix / Squarespace - drag-and-drop builders, fastest path for non-coders, paid plans, easy custom domain. Best if no one wants to maintain code.
• WordPress - flexible, common, large plugin ecosystem.
• GitHub Pages (often with Jekyll) - free static hosting , version-controlled, and easy to hand off as members graduate (transfer the GitHub org). Popular with code-savvy teams — a common pattern is a static site generator (e.g., Jekyll) hosted on GitHub Pages under the team’s GitHub organization, which keeps the site version-controlled and easy to hand off as members graduate. Best if you have programmers who want full control.

Whatever you pick, get a real custom domain (e.g., team1234.org) - it looks far more credible than a free subdomain and reinforces your brand.

Site structure (the pages that matter)

Design for your three key audiences - sponsors, recruits, and judges:

• Home - who you are in one screen: number, name, logo, a strong photo, and a one-line mission.
• About / The Team - story, mission, subteams, mentors, and your team photo.
• Robots / Seasons - a page per year with the robot, results, and reveal video. This doubles as a record for award submissions.
• Outreach / Impact - your community work, demos, and STEM events; this is gold for the Impact Award and for sponsors.
• Sponsors - logos (linked), tiers, and a clear “Sponsor Us” call to action with your packet.
• Join / Contact - how students join and how to reach you.
• Blog / News (optional) - build updates and event recaps that also help SEO.

Design and accessibility

• Apply your brand: colors, fonts, logo, and consistent imagery.
• Mobile-first: most visitors are on phones - test on a phone.
• Accessibility: add alt text to images, ensure sufficient color contrast (WCAG AA, 4.5:1 for body text), and use real headings so screen readers and search engines understand your pages. This widens your reach and is simply the right thing to do.
• Keep it fast: compress images before uploading.

Keeping it alive

The hardest part of a website is maintenance. To survive graduation:

• Document how to edit the site in your team wiki.
• Assign a web lead each year and a backup.
• For GitHub Pages, keep the repo in a team organization (not a personal account) so access transfers cleanly.
• Do a preseason audit: update the year, robot page, roster, and sponsor logos.

A stale website with last year’s robot tells sponsors and judges you don’t follow through. A current one tells them you do.

Key takeaways

• Your website is owned media for sponsors, recruits, and judges; a current, on-brand site signals a sustainable program
• Pick a platform matched to your skills (Wix/Squarespace for non-coders, GitHub Pages for programmers) and use a custom domain
• Plan for handoff: keep a GitHub org, document editing, assign a web lead, and audit the site every preseason

This lesson was adapted from learnfrc.com.