Hi All,
Sorry for not replying earlier. I had to get some sleep after staying awake
for 32hours.
So, I captained the team that won the 2015 WebCup, and I believe that I'm
in a good position to comment on, first, the site we made, then webcup
organisation.
*So about our website : *
The question was:
>
>
> *2050....Nearly 60 million people live in Indian Ocean islands.To promote
> and facilitate trade and cultural exchange between all these people, the
> best scientists have created a revolutionary mode of transport to serve
> the seven islands Grande Comores, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mayotte, Reunion
> Island, Rodridgues, Seychelles.The launch is imminent, and you have to
> develop the web portal presenting this fabulous transport of the future,
> and, all the innovative services that can be attached to it.*
We proposed the idea of ATMA.
*ATMA - Automated Transfer or Mind and Assets. *
We used, 3D-modelling-softwares/AngularJS/Bootstrap(very little) and a lot
of code & ideas. No back-end - This is a portal as per the question, not an
online service, we didn't feel we needed a back-end at all.
Now, Of course I agree that this is not the best website in the world. But
after we made the whole thing(assets & code & routing system), during the
24hours, its easy to overlook simple features like mouse hovers. If I look
at the site right now, I can already point out several UX mistakes, but it
doesn't not mean that we didn't deserve to win. Very few teams actually
coded their website on the spot from scratch. hell.. we even saw a Wix
website.
I still think we were the best among the 19teams technically & graphically.
Obviously there's so much that can be improved technically on the site we
made especially while in bringing the different elements together. I feel
that our two graphics guys were outstanding. All the images and videos were
made right there. The only photo we downloaded from the internet was the
photo of Lady gaga to illustrate a human-face in one of the videos.We also
took inspiration from visually-impressive user-interfaces from the web and
adapted their concept to our websites.
Something else that's very important is that in the rules we had a limit of
150MB per website. We also had a bandwidth of 50M available and the website
was supposed to exist in 2050. So we didn't hold back on using
heavy(filesize) assets to our advantage. I also used a manifest file to
load the ENTIRE ASSETS LIBRARY in the first load, so that we didn't
encounter 'loading issues' during the presentation. Its generally a good
thing to do on Single Page Applications like this one.
Also, when its 5am, and you've been coding since 1pm the previous day, you
feel like in auto-pilot mode and just go with the plan that was made
earlier. New ideas stop appearing. See our commit messages towards the end.
https://twitter.com/__Sun__/status/602501929432981505
*Unused Ideas*
Sadly we had to give up on some concepts that we thought of because we felt
that we wouldn't get enough time to elaborate on them. If anyone is
interested I can explain some of them.
*Now coming to the Organisation. *
I was also present at the first webcup, and I don't feel they improved a
lot. Thankfully we got a decent laptop for the presentation(but no mouse -
try using a new touch pad when you've not slept for 30hours...)
The most dissapointing part was after the competition ended, we had to
stand outside and wait for the staff to finish eating. We had nowhere to
sit and everybody was obviously very tired. I also felt that 19teams was
way too much. 8 Minutes per team presentation, gives your a 3 hour long
presentation session(we haven't slept yet, remember).
The food was good. Drinks were good. Some teams put loud music and
disturbed other teams. I complained about that and the staff solved the
issue.
*The Competition and the Rules*
The rules mentioned that the use of CMS was allowed. I think (too)many
participants confused that rule, and used CMS with pre-made templates. I
think the rules were clear enough. Its entirely fair to use a cms and code
the front-end & back-end logic. Its *not *bad*.*
Although I think its better to enforce a 'make everything from scratch'
rule so that we can have a real competition, on equal grounds. Lets be
honest, those who used templates didn't have any chance of winning. The
only sad thing in this, is that another team could have been in their slot.
A wasted slot.
The presentation had to be good. Short. There was a timer in-front of the
speaker during the presentation. A lot of teams didn't get to present the
whole thing due to time restrictions. I prompted the jury for more
questions during the question time as I was confident I could answer to any
of their question.
*Hosting*
We planned to host on our own server, but filezilla didnt want to connect.
We didnt bother too much and used the webcup server. I got a lot of
feedback that its displaying a 403 error. I contacted the office(I'm on
holiday today) and told them to move the site to our on server. It will be
up soon.
*Conclusion,*
I'm still not fully recovered, sorry for typos..
I might have missed some points. Let me know if there's anything I can
explain, here or on twitter.
Happy to help
Thanks and Regards,
*RAMGOLAM Sandeep*
*Front-end Developer - Designer - Web Enthusiast - Gamer**Website :*
barfii.net <
http://www.barfii.net>
On 25 May 2015 at 01:09, S Moonesamy <sm+mu_at_elandsys.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> At 12:28 24-05-2015, Tejas Pagooah (Nirvan) wrote:
>
>> Congratulations to the Prodigious team, that is our fellow friend, Sun (I
>> guess he was the lead in the team). Actually, I liked idea pretty much,
>> their concept was unique and as mentioned earlier, they coded everything
>> from scratch.
>>
>
> The user experience of that web site is below what I would expect from
> your friend. I found the menu confusing. There are times when a unique
> concept is not a good idea.
>
> I suggest reviewing what you wrote above if you are interested in
> understanding the problem.
>
> Regards,
> S. Moonesamy
>
>
Received on Mon May 25 2015 - 07:28:43 PST