Robotics Website Redesign

I spent about 10 hours each day during the entire April break of my freshman year in high school doing this, building each page from scratch on RapidWeaver. The intention was to make the site more consistent and responsive, so it would look good on not just a desktop computer but also a phone.

Now that I set up my server, I figured that I would figure out how to host the site on the server — so I did just that. After another week of configuring that by playing around with DNS and SSL and a bunch of other annoying things, I finally got it working. I would say the hardest part was dealing with the DNS and the way it caches on your computer. There were many changes that I made, and I soon found myself using 5 different web browsers to make sure things with the DNS worked. The SSL was also tricky, as my Synology server did not want to use any SSL certificate I gave it at first.

Now gnsrobotics.com was hosted on my server! Not only did I find that to be super cool at the time but also realized that it saved our team about $70/mo on website costs. But self-hosting a website (properly) is much harder than you think.

To this day, I still manage the website and host it on my Synology. While it is quite time consuming at times, I really do enjoy managing the site. In the last picture here, you can see how I edit the site.

The one thing about this that is not ideal is that the website only works when my power is on — which is a huge majority of the time, but nevertheless it will go out every once in a while and make the website inaccessible. Yet, I think the virtually unlimited storage I get (and also the ability to just drag and drop a file via Finder to have it accessible with a web link) greatly outweighs that drawback.

When I first got the site up and running, it was only running on a 75mbps upload/download speed. It was fine for the site itself, but made downloading videos hosted on it quite slow. So a couple months later, we upgraded our Internet speed to Verizon's 1gbps upload/download speed (for actually $200 cheaper/mo compared to the old speed (don't even get me started about why. I may do a blog post about that in the future)) and that improved things dramatically.

Overall, the whole website redesign experience was an exhausting one but a fun one nonetheless. I've taught a couple other people how to manage the website when I'm done with high school, and I can't wait to see how they take the site to the next level.

Here is our old site: https://gnsrobotics.wixsite.com/2638