Hey guys and gals, I’m here to give you some pointers on how to win a ThinkQuest competition. You can take advice from me because I have 2 years of experience with the contest and 5+ years in the web development. Now I’m not gonna make this boring for you guys to read so I’m gonna put some things that NYCBOE don’t want your virgin eyes to read. LOL! Sorry I couldn’t make it to your class this Friday. But I’m willing to help you out here.

During my two visits to your class, I have notice that most of the sites are very poorly designed. Your websites cannot be looking like Ms D’Amato’s Litstudies website, cause it’s ugly [shh, she already knows but let’s just keep it on the low]. Some of you may say, “oh but my site has nice content”, thats only half of the points on their rubric system, the other half comes from the design.

In the 2006 contest, I learned that the design is actually the more important factor in the competition. For some reason, TQNYC has put less interest in the actual content of these “educational” websites but more focus on the look and feel of it. As stupid as that sounds, we have to play by their rules. Every year, they invite more and more people from the corporate world to judge these websites. This is bad for those of you with content rich websites and good for those with appealing designs, quite frankly, I believe that they don’t really read the content of the websites, they just judge it by how it looks. I say that with confidence because if they did actually read through everything, then my team last year would have won 1st place.

Now, I personally disagree with the fact that all the groups in the class are doing websites within the same general topic area. This sorta cancels out the chances of two groups within the class winning the competition. Yes, that did happen in the past but as I explained before, the competition has changed a lot. I really don’t think that two websites with the same general topic can take the win anymore unless they are REALLY outstanding compared to the other runner ups. However, this is an English Honors class and you have to do something within the area of English.

Many of you sent me your passwords and asked me to help you install a Content Manager System, the only reason I recommended this was because it’s a lot easier for those of you who are not familiar with web development to update your websites and relief the strain on the person who does all the updating for the team [in both years, that person was me, it was HELL]. So without furtheradue, I’m going to introduce to you a few easy to use content manager systems.

Content Managers I Recommend:

• WordPress - This is a blogging engine that I like to use, this is acutally running my website right now. Check it out! Look around, if you like what you see, this is probably for you. A lot of support and plugins out there for the WordPress blogging engine. This can be configured to be used as not ONLY a blog but a normal to use, easy to update website.
• Joomla - A little more complicated to use but a lot more powerful, you can ask Felix about it, the support for this engine is a lot smaller than WordPress but I’m willing to help. Administrator control panel can be confusing to those of you who are new to it.
• Drupal - Easier to use compared to Joomla, great support. SpreadFireFox.com uses the Drupal engine, like what you see, this is for you. Friendly community, easy to use.
• Typo3 - Very easy to customize, great looking templates, easy to use. Good support community.

These are listed in no particular order. I like them all, I know them all, you can ask for my support at any time. They are all free and opensource. If you want to explorer other content manager systems, you can see here.

For those of you who wants me to install it for you, pick the one you want and send me an email and I will install it for you.

Also when I came to visit, a lot of you were interested in college, you can ask me questions about college as well.

Please post comments below to contact me, I will respond to you ASAP!