A group of innovative students is preparing to compete at the national level after developing a standout website for the Technology Student Association’s (TSA) Web Design competition. The team of Lizzy Newell, Elias Cardoso-Ortiz, Ava Ritchie, Cody Lawson, and Logan Clifton created a fictional vegan restaurant called Sprout to Spoon, blending creativity, collaboration, and technical skills to bring their concept to life.
After placing first at regionals and third at state, they’re now setting their sights on the TSA National Conference in Nashville, TN from June 27 to July 1.
Their challenge was to design a website for a vegan or vegetarian restaurant. Lizzy said the team came up with the name Sprout to Spoon to reflect a farm-to-table concept, aiming for a name that captured their overall vision. From the start, they approached the project with organization and intention. Lizzy explained that they wanted to build a visual framework to guide their work, creating mockups that helped them map out what each page would look like before jumping into the technical side.
Each student took responsibility for building one or two pages of the site. Design consistency became a shared priority once the pages were in place. A few team members took on the task of ensuring that colors and styles were coherent across the site. Lizzy noted how important it was for the entire website to feel unified so users wouldn’t feel like they were jumping between different sites. Decisions about navigation and content were guided by a combination of creativity and the official TSA competition rubric
While the website design process began in September and continued almost daily, the team admitted that the interview portion of the state competition didn’t go quite as planned. They’re determined to fix that before nationals by preparing a polished and confident group pitch. Still, the students remain optimistic.
Although not all the students plan to pursue web design as a career, they each said the experience gave them valuable insight. Logan plans to go into cybersecurity and said the project gave him confidence in his technical skills. Lizzy, once interested in digital forensics, is now leaning toward a career in law and political science, but believes accomplishments like this one still demonstrate valuable experience and work ethic. Elias hopes to become a software engineer and said learning about the roles of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript gave him a strong foundation. Ava, whose older brother introduced her to web design, now plans to switch paths and study psychology. Cody, who initially thought he wanted to be a web developer, realized through this project that he’d rather focus on programming and data.
As the competition draws closer, the team will continue working remotely over the summer, fine-tuning the website and preparing for their presentation.