Warlocks web sites through the years

2005

The Warlocks had a web page even in their very first year. This simple page was created by Bryan Gritzmacher. It included some fancy tables to put rounded corners on the boxes in the site. Server-side includes were used to place the sidebars on the pages. Photos were stored in a Flickr Gallery and a widget was on the front page. The famous Warlocks Wizard logo was created by Vax Liu before she was even on the team.

2006

Our second effort at a web page had a blueprint theme. The logo was created by Al Gritzmacher. Mike Carlino had a hand in the writing and upkeep of this page as well. All mostly hand-written, but still using server-side includes for the header and menus.

2007-2008

The next site ventured into a new realm of a Content Management System. We had no students really interested in web design, so the thought was, if we made a site with a web interface that anyone could log in to and add updates, it would let more students have input. The site was built on the powerful and complicated Drupal platform and, in all honesty, we only took advantage of a fraction of it's potential. Customizing the theme was difficult, so it was kept simple.

The idea that more students would participate by posting to their accounts on the site was a mixed success. a few did, but quickly got bored with it. Most updates to the site were made by Al Gritzmacher.

2009

I've forgotten which students had a hand in this site. It may be the first year that Adam Stockton worked on it. Much of the site was hand written again, but by now, we did use a photo gallery for our collection of team photographs. We began posting reports of our competition matches directly from the events when wi-fi was available and they became popular with friends and family back home following our progress.

2010

A catchy graphic at the top and diamond-plate background set the theme for this year. Something new this year was a forum that the students could discuss topics in. It got some use, but still was mostly ignored.

2011

Similar to the 2010 page, Adam Stockton continued to do most of the work on the site. While it may look the same, under the hood, it now relied on PHP to assemble the page elements into what you saw online.

2012

Another similar look, the advancements continued to go on under the hood. This site is built entirely in PHP and also included Javascript and a video player. This site also automatically detected mobile browsers and redirected them to a mobile optimized site. Adam Stockton won the Website Award at the Buckeye regional with this site.

2013

After Adam's coup at Buckeye, FIRST decided to discontinue the website award at a regional level. We still put forth the effort to make a quality web site. This year's site continued to rely on PHP and Javascript as well as adding a simple content management system to allow parts of the website to be updated from a web login without HTML knowledge.

Photo Gallery

One of the richest displays of our teams' history is our photo gallery. Over the years, we've had various pieces of web software to display them, but recently, all the photos we had online have been consolidated into one repository. With ten seasons and over 7000 photos, you can spend a lot of time looking back on our past accomplishments.