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Markville Secondary School’s Computer Science Education Club (CSEC) is a student-run club for students interesting in competitive programming, and computer science in general. Our main focus is preparing students for programming competitions through lessons provided by our two subclubs: Beginners’, which aims to prepare students for the Junior Canadian Computing Competition (CCC); and Advanced, which aims to prepare students for the Senior CCC.

As useful as Google Drive was, it suffered from two key drawbacks: it had extremely clumsy math equation support, and proper formatting and highlighting of code was very tedious.

These limitations pushed us to explore building a website to use as a new publishing platform. As the only exec with web development experience, the responsibility for planning, designing, building, and maintaining this website fell on my shoulders. Despite limited time constraints and development time interrupted by vacation, the site went into public beta in time for our first public session, and was officially released shortly later.

Preparations

We started by outlining our goals and the general structure for the site. Eventually, we settled on these goals:

Apart from these common goals, I also kept my own goal for the website: to be easy to maintain and extend for future executives. This meant a modular design and the ability to edit the website with minimal configuration changes.

On the infrastructure side,