VTHSPCwebsite

Virginia Tech hosts a yearly high school coding competition. This contest is held online and contains information of current and past events. The website is dated, which makes it unappealing and hard to navigate. Our client, Dr. Godmar Back, tasked us with the goal to create a new website, with the new website meeting a few requirements. Anyone could theoretically use the website by visiting https://vthspc.cs.vt.edu/, but the main users would be those interested in the Virginia Tech High School Programming Contest. Users would be able to see detailed information about the current and past contests. This information ranges from organization details like when and where the contest is held to rules, regulations, and FAQ. Our team's main goal for this project is to not just improve the look and feel of the website but to also attract the new generation of coders. We believe that with what we completed for this project it would help those interested in coding actually take the first step. This high school programming contest is a great way to get high school students involved in the first place, but with a better and modern design, even more people will be attracted. The website has three distinct type of pages. First is the Contest Description page, where the current year's competition is described. Second is the Past Contest pages, where each previous contest has their own page, containing their separate information. Third is the General FAQ page, where the average user can get answers to commonly asked questions. All of these pages were created using Docusarus, an open source tool for building, deploying and maintaining websites, and each page was written in Markdown/MDX. When deploying the website, Docusaurus takes the Markdown/MDX files and builds them into static HTML files to be served. Once the website was completed, we had fellow classmates and student participate in a Google Forms survey, where they were asked questions about the design and structure of the website, and given test cases to gauge the difficulty of finding specific information on the website. Overall, the response to the survey was positive. The website is available at https://vthspc.cs.vt.edu/.