About the Project

Sheffield's NoDDSoc is a student society dedicated to TTRPGs. We run various events throughout the year, including one-shots, and larger campaigns. Needless to say, there's a lot of information we need to keep track of and share with our members.

In years past, NoDDSoc had a website that it would use to do all of this, but that website has since been lost to the ether. After I was elected Webmaster, I decided I wanted to rebuild that website from the ground up. Thus, this project was born.

Project Requirements

There were a few key considerations I had to keep in mind when developing this project:

• The majority of Committee are not technical, so updating this will be the Webmaster's job
• Future Webmasters aren't guaranteed to be CompSci students, so the project should be as simple as possible to make changes to
• The website needed to be accessible on all types of devices and to all types of users
• Ideally, the project should be able to host an online library that would let people borrow books from us
• If possible, the project should be able to host an online newsletter that we can use to update our members on what's going on

Technologies Used

There were a few technologies I considered in planning for this project, the big ones being:

• Svelte (which is what this website is written in)
• Raw HTML & CSS files
• A website builder like Google Sites
• MkDocs and its various plugins & themes

In the end, I settled on Material for MkDocs, a beautiful theme for MkDocs that also provides a lot of additional functionality that would be incredibly useful for this project. The main reasons I chose Material for this project include:

• The site's content is primarily Markdown, so should be simple for a future Webmaster to learn
• The theme includes both a blogging system and tagging, which would allow us to have a newsletter and online library respectively
• The interface is intuitive, accessible and easy to work with

The Project Going Forward

Now that we're comfortably settled in with Material, there's not much else left to do besides write the content. It's still a work in progress, and there's lots more to be done, but the foundation has been laid and the technical aspects are finished.