ICDA Website
Frontend
Full Stack
The ICDA
The Illinois Congressional Debate Association (ICDA) is the sole congressional debate (otherwise known as student congress) circuit in the state of Illinois. It provides leadership for the development, supervision, and promotion of congressional debate competition across Illinois, and stresses the educational importance of congressional debate activities, along with a spirit of cooperation and friendship amongst our membership.
I was a competitor in the ICDA throughout my time in high school, and was privileged to be offered an opportunity to refurbish and update its old website.
Version 1.0
Over the summer of 2024, my friend and I expanded and overhauled the ICDA's website, building it from the ground up with a total new layout and design theme.
We were given largely free reign to create whatever we wanted, so we focused on a couple key priorities:
- Disseminating information: Adding new spots to showcase information about ICDA and the structure of congressional debate.
- Tournament resources: Providing more easily-accessible information about tournament dates, locations, and important documents like legislation and results.
- General resources: Increasing accessibility of documents and other general information about key parts of congressional debate and ICDA rules.
- Recruitment: Encouraging site users who are not current members of the ICDA to join and/or urge their schools to join.
Other changes included standardized page/heading content, improved mobile accessibility for Android, iOS, and other cellular devices, and multimedia elements aimed at expanding awareness, encouraging increased participation, and providing valuable resources for new/returning debaters.
During the process of building this website, we gathered feedback on design and functionality from both the ICDA and potential end users, collaborated with oversight with continuous information flow to modernize specific design choices and improve website appearance, and overcame severe limitations (including a lack of suitable support for server-side scripting) to deliver a functioning and visually-appealing website within the designated timeframe.
Version 2.0
While we were certainly happy with our progress in developing version 1.0, the new ICDA website was certainly not without its flaws.
The largest problem was a data one - since the entire site was just static HTML pages served by an Apache HTTP server, updates could only be made by physically altering the HTML code. As a result, important and constantly changing information (i.e. tournament dates, member schools, etc.) could only be changed by us, the programmers. Because of this and other problems, during the summer of 2025, we focused on developing version 2.0 of the website.
The key focus of this version was adding a full backend written in PHP and connected to an external MySQL database, which would allow circuit administrators to securely update important data and other information on the website without having to fully update the source code, future-proofing the website for long term use. Some other changes included:
- Support for dynamic, markdown-based news posts to share additional information on what ICDA is doing (see photo).
- An automatically-updating archive of old tournament records/information.
- SEO and Social Media Optimizations.
- Animations to make the site feel more alive.
Version 2.0 is the final version of the ICDA Website and will not be updated in the future unless new bugs arise.
Check out the ICDA Website at https://icdadebate.org.