Design Goals of this Site
Since FIRST's goal is changing the culture, this website is designed to be usable by as large a percentage of the culture as possible. The primary design focus for this website was to make the content as accessible to as many people as possible, while still having a graphically pleasing look and staying easy to manage. As such, most of the site's layout is provided by a CSS-based solution for speed, maintainability, and to facilitate use by the visually impaired. No "advanced" CSS features were used due to the very unreliable support of them. Because of this, this website is viewable in almost any browser available. For more specifics, see below.
Accessibility
The overall look and style of the page is maintained across platforms and browsers, even when using non-standards compliant browsers like IE. The site is tested to work under IE7, IE6, Firefox, and Opera on Windows; Safari, Firefox, and Opera on Mac; and Epiphany, Galeon, and Konqueror on Linux. This means that the vast majority of the browsing public can view the website as it was intended to be seen. However, some people still use very old browsers that have no CSS support. To cater to those people, the website was designed to degrade gracefully into a still usable site that just lacks some of the graphical niceties (the menus, for example no longer drop down, they just become basic lists). This feature also allows the site to be browsed by the visually impaired. Unlike Flash and frame-based sites, this website is usable with text-only browsers and thus usable by those who have either very poor vision or no ability to see at all. Users with older computers can also view this site since the page width is designed to scale with the width of the user's browser window. In fact, practically the entire site is designed with a fluid layout that allows users to scale text up or down to aid in readability (Ctr++ and Ctrl+- in Firefox) and have the site maintain usability. Specifically, this feature allows older individuals increased access to our content since they can scale up text that they have trouble reading. There are other little things that boost usability (like the use of sans-serif fonts), but these two are the backbone of our accessibility initiative. Our commitment to maintaining accessibility forced us to forgo some things that could make this site prettier such as images for menus, which are hard to use for the visually impaired, but allow for a wider selection of fonts. Even though there were some sacrifices, we feel that the bonus of reaching a whole culture instead of those select few who meet specific computer and visual requirments was worth it.
Manageability
Every page of this site (except the image gallery and forum, which use different systems) is generated by three files and a MySQL database. We wrote a custom, lightweight interface to the MySQL database; the interface allows for version control of content, as well as rapid editing. The page's look and layout is created by a CSS file in combination with semantic markup. The whole system is designed to make administration of the site a pleasure instead of a pain. To make site-wide changes, the webmaster can alter one of the three files; to make changes to specific pages, the webmaster can easily edit or create a new entry in the database. If a bad edit is made, the page can be rolled back to an earlier version using the version control capabilities of the system. The system also provides for an approval system, allowing content-creators to make changes that can be approved for viewing by the general public by an administator.