NYC Web Contest Problems & A Letter to FIRST...
 

Everyone by now probably knows the results of the NYC Web Contest - Team 19 won( http://bigredrobotics.com ). But was that the best NYC had to offer? No. A close inspection of the list reveals many quality sites, and one among them is the site of XHS Robotics-my team ( http://xhsrobotics.org ). Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems apparent that the rules presented in pages 26-29 in the Awards Manual and the Judging Ballot provided had not one thing to do with how the sites were selected. At the event, it was noted that only a few teams (possible even just one) had voted. Keep in mind that a team cannot vote for itself. It is also troubling that teams only handed in a ballot with one name-not the judging form-a far better inidcator of a good site. So all emotions aside, I think an Open Letter to FIRST is in order that at least aims to change the way things are done as far as the Web Contest. We've already had some realy comforting support from other teams in the NYC area. This has been very encouraging, to say the least. As one person said in a brief post on this topic, members of the team didn't acknowledge or mention that they had a website-even the coach.

Yes, I would agree that there are some problems. Re: my other post about GL, personally, I think that there were better sites than the one that won. (and not necessarly our team either)

However, this is the first year for the website award, and it's bound to be messy. One idea I have is for a site to win, they should have to submit a vote themselves.

don't know. I guess just a team haveing a site is cool.
Hopefully better next year.

PS: Is there a website comp for nats?

Yes, very true. But I would say that there are other at least reasonable acceptable sites in the NYC regional. But if say only one team voted - they would be forced to vote against their own interest. Also, I think that FIRSt Judges should have the ultimate say. I'm sure there are some great outstanding professionals who would love to judge websites. I find it highly ironic that an organization For the Inspiration of Science and Technology refuses to really recognize, take seriously, or put major effort into recognizing or promoting a form of computer technology. In many cases, teams put more work into their web sites than their robots! Certainly the student ballot system was the path of least resistance from FIRST's standpoint, but was clearly a terrible solution.

Count me in! I do believe we need to let FIRST know that the student ballot system failed.... I'm agreeing that it should be a judge's award, I said that as soon as i read about the award.

Yeah, I'd have to agree with you on this one.

I was curious as to what kind of website(s) can win an award like this so I logged on to team 19's website when I got home after NYC.

The first thing I noticed was that the last activity on the site, going by the updates on the right hand side, was after Nats. last year.

I was shocked and sort of dismayed to see a site that wasn't updated often win the award.
And the color sheme - Grey text on a black background... Ickk!!!

Oh BTW, nice site AugustF.
I'm also glad to know that one of my teammates helped bring your spirits up about this issue, thanks for the props for that one on your site! :)

I totally agree. The website award this year was mediocore, I'm sure in most cases there were only 1 or 2 votes for the winning teams, with no garentee the votes were counted or not forged.

I have not seen any of the rules of the contest being enforced by the judges, even seeing non-student built websites win at regionals. I'm sure some teams will agree with me when I say that there are only 3-4 websites worthy of this award at each regional.. and in most cases.. none of them won it.

It isn't fair.. and probably never will be... but that's what life is...

I agree that the Website award process needs to be looked at and improved before next year. I like Jack's idea about having to vote to be able to win.

Another idea (which could be used along with Jack's idea) is to have the teams vote, and then the top N sites get judged by the Judges at the competition. They would only have to look at N websites rather than every website.

Just an idea.

I am also on team #806, and I have to say that I am disappointed at the winning website. I have seen all of the websites for the NYC regional and there were at least a handful of better sites. I have also looked at a select few of other regionals and found that this was not the only disappointment. Many of the other championships also had crappy pages chosen when there were better ones. I have not fully read the rules, but I think that the web site award should be left entirely up to the judges. I mean, lets face it, if there were a vote, i bet almost all of us would be able to form a fake vote or something to help our own team, and i bet less than half would hesitate to do it. If a decision is made by a panel of judges, we would have little influence on the outcome.

------I know I am not the only one who feels this way------

We "won" (for lack of a better term) this award at Midwest, but I totally agree. I talked with some FIRST Staff and other long-time FIRSTers and they all agree that the website award did not pan out they way they hoped. :(

My suggestion of improvement to add to the list is have webmasters from, say, amazon.com, google.com, yahoo.com, etc... have the final vote. Isn't Dean good friends w/ Bezos? I'll bet the folks at amazon would participate.

Another idea is perhaps to only allow rookie and 2nd year teams to compete for the award. In all honesty, would anyone really be able to match CD for a website award?

KA-108

well, based on the rules i don't think CD is even eligable as it is not student desined, built, or maintained even though it is a great resource for first

You're right, we're just here for you guys, not an award.. We are not entered in the website competition this year. I do web development all day every day at work, so it wouldn't be fair.

I like that idea.

Another interesting twist to the competition could be that the site has to be 100% valid WC3 compliant html. ;) I'd fail; I'm messy.

nooooo... w3c?????

about that only thing i go for is:

lower case tags, proper nesting, and the <br /> and <input... /> instead of the <br> tags.

Yeah, I guess it would be a twist, but... you're killing all the guys that do codeing by hand. (At least i'd like to think that dreamweaver is w3c compliant and thus those sites would be cool.) Actually, most likely having to do something like that would be good for me but... remember:

webmaster == lazy; // :D

(Aside- Dean did say something about "fairness" at Kickoff.......)

Fishing for feedback here. Do we not qualify because sometimes we do, but sometimes we don't?

There is a lot of gray area on our site. Some pages are 100% student. Others were 100% student but they graduated and this year's kids (or myself) tweaked a little to make it 2003 compliant.

Also the ideas for the site comes from everywhere- students, engineers, alumni, CD Users, friends, visiting other websites, etc... But most times the StUDentS just dont have the technical background to put the page together (or not in a timely manner) so Mike or I (now engineers, but former students) do the coding, BUT, as best we can, do it in front of them or explain it afterwards so they learn for next time.

Also, web dev for us is two pieces: the SQL code to get the data and the HTML/CF to present it. The kids spent most of the time on the SQL and CF. Character %-wise that is very small compared to the HTML, so how do you rate that?

Also, some SOAP Pages are just links to movies. I did the CF for it, but the StUDentS are the ones spending mad hours of time at the regionals and back home digitizing and uploading them. So, again, more gray area.

KA-108 :cool:

Couple more ideas:

Keep the award, but
* make the trophy 1/2 size OR
* make it a certificate award and not a trophy award

In other words, try to de-emphasize any "team voted" awards.


KA-108 :cool:

I do think they only judge the websites that turn in the ballot. Because at Sacramento regional only on ballot was turned in i think. Which was by our team and the the award was tied between our teams website and the site i voted for. Persoanlly think that the website award should be looked by the judges a little bit more.

~ Akshay

I think it should reamin a trophy. Some teams have a person put lots of time into their site, and just like an animation, they should have a regular award for it.

I think that FIRST will learn some things from this year and make the process better next year. Also, i'd think that they would listen to our ideas, so any more?

w3c compliance isn't hard.

the only thing most people have to lose is those customized scrollbar colors (*cough*propietary*cough*) In all actuality, getting something to comply with the letter of the specs is maybe 30 minutes of work (provided your site has a templating system inplace). Complying with the SPIRIT of the specs though... I'd love to see how many people would enter for that...

Well it all depends on how each judge interprets the rules. There is nothing stopping ChiefDelphi from running in the competition, Brandon just knows that it is important to give others a chance.

The rules un-clearly state:

From what you said, your website would be fine, as long as the pages done from last year, aren't continually updated by those former students who are no longer on the team. If the pages are still on the site, and the newer versions of the page were updated by current students.. you should be fine.

I my opinion, from what you said, it looks like some good portions of your site are not done by students.. just because they can't do it...

Everyone loves your pages, and the things you accomplish are great..

But... this gives quite the unfair advantage from many teams... who likewise cannot do the kind of things your mentors can.

That sort of thing isn't quite fair.

I know the season is over, but has anyone done any more with this? It would be good to make sure something is done about this for next year.

I figure at those yearly in person forum get=togethers this will be brought up for next season.

Yeah considering they have online programs that do that for you.

I like this suggestion. Get local web design/web business people to do the judging. Better yet, get a person/people from autodesk who knows ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about FIRST (besides that it's a robot competition and basic stuff) and let him/her judge which site taught them the most about FIRST and their team.

On a side note W3C compliance would be a pain for me to deal with, all my programming is messy, messy, messy. It's like a maze in there.

Yeah... I know some have talked about W3C...

My thought is:

There really are very few sites that actually are W3C compliant. (Heck, www.usfirst.org doesn't even begin to be w3c... it's doctype is missing (ex: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> ) , and cd is missing a content type (ex: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">) ) If two major first sites don't begin to meet the first two "points" of W3C, why should I have to worry about my every tag? However, I would recommend viewing a site it a few types of browsers (IE, Netscape, Mozilla, ...) with at different sizes (800x600, 1024x786) using different speeds (56k, 128k, 500k, ...) to make sure that a site can be viewed by most people.

Even though my team's website won for Manchvegas--as I felt it should have--I would like to see it judged more professionally. Our team printed out flyers for our websites and went around handing them to other people in the pits. I know that when I was handing them out I got a lot of "what, you expect me to care?" looks in response and people not wanting to take our flyers.

--Petey

Yeah. I know that I spent about four solid weeks with Volte--the design god for our team--working on the content and programming of our site. A lot of hard work went into our site and prototype sites before it. It should stay an award.

There's a problem with with making w3c compliance mandatory. If you use the W3C validator on their website, you will find that hardly anything with coding on it--that is, anything other than straight up HTML--fails to validate. This includes www.theforceteam.com, www.chiefdelphi.com, www.amazon.com, and www.cnn.com.

Thus, it is probable that, if textbook w3c compliance was mandatory, a site written in four minutes on notepad would have to win over something made in DreamWeaver over a course of two months.

I think that only one question should be asked of the compatibility of the site: does it work in most browsers? If so, than it's fine.

--Petey

totally agree, all it matters is if the end user is able to see the website in thier browser. Or atleast most of the browsers out there. I would say if your website is compatible with IE, MOzilla and Netscape. the rest automatically will adapt. W3c doesnt do a good job updating their standards. ITs to hard for them to keep up with the new technologies that have been introduced in the recent years. So i dont think its a good idea to incorporate W3C as a standard.
~ A M X

LOL. I dont think you would be the only one.

My team won the webdesign competition for the Canadian Regional. http://www.stmichaelscollege.ca/robotics

I thought the ballot system really did work at our regional (and I dont say that because Im biased to my team). All our teams were actually warned PRIOR to the competition about checking out all the websites.

What I suggest for next year is to have a website voting system online. They should develop a component of the Team Managment System that allows you to visit each page and critique on every aspect.

The system should be designed so that developers like myself could easily browse through the pages. Then not only will it be fair but it would allow for better organization of the votes and better statistic viewing at the end.

BTW the XHSRobotics site is looking pretty cool :-) The background is awesome. :-)

My 2 Cents
 

Here's my comments on the entirety (sp?) of the Web Site Design award.

As webmaster for my team, I took a quick look at the requirements and stuff for the award and had a few initial impressions, many of them aforementioned:
a) It is VERY vague
b) It really has no requirements/guidelines
c) It can easily be construed as an invitation, no COMPETITION between teams to forego content in favor of design.

Before anyone jumps on my back about the last point there, let me make my case.

Especially with the existance of CD, there is really no reason for EVERY team out there to have a forum for discussion....if you want one, fine, but most teams could solve this with a much less bandwidth-intensive and more effective mailing list or something between team members. I noticed several teams' sites that include forums with maybe two or three posts per week between team members. What is the use? This is not a race to make people ooh and ahhh at your pages' use of new technology per se, but to use the web to effectively express the mission, ideas, and news about your team for the world to see.

FLASH. For the most part, this is another waste of time and bandwidth. For its credit, there are team pages out there that use it effectively, and it can be used effectively. However, when all it serves to do is create an annoying and slow-loading intro or something like that.....all it is is flashy crap, not real content. The focus of this award should be perhaps content and effectiveness....something almost entirely antithetical to Flash use.

Enough about Form vs. Function.

About the awards' judging and whatnot: My team entered at the Chesapeake Regional (at which I arrived late) to find "oh-you have to fill this out, it's due in like 20 minutes", a form for the award. Onsite judging for web pages is almost impossible, and is extremely ineffective. Without web access on-site, you can't judge perhaps recent updates, design changes, etc., nor can you really without previous familiarity with other teams' pages and their content BY TEAM NUMBER, effectively off the top of your head vote and rate as if you have the pages in front of you.

To top it off, when I went to hand in the form, they weren't even sure what to do with it....it took them five minutes to even figure that out....

The W3C compliant challenge is effectively moot....I doubt FIRST will implement that. However, here is my addition to the other challenge....make EVERY page backwards-compliant and TEST it THOROUGHLY in every browser you can get your hands on before you use it. This includes LYNX and old versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer. My personal browser of choice is iCab for Mac, and (sorry to the winner of the Canadian Regional's website award) I was able to tell how their page is designed to look, but it loads very improperly in that and other browsers I have used. Don't assume that everyone has the (or is even capable of having) the latest browsers and every plugin under the sun. Many users out there are still using old PCs and Macs with antiquated browsers to browse the internet - and a good design job will work well in their Netscape 1.1 or whatever just as well as Internet Explorer 6 on Windoze XP. A bad one (or a rushed one) will look bad on an old browser, and to a decent web designer will look just as bad on a new one. The old maxim still applies - KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid).....don't try to go for form over function. Functionality first, (i.e. content, actual information) over bells and whistles.

And, of course, remember that the average American attention span is very short....for those of us still on dialup or with slow computers, an alternative web page is just a click away........

Sorry this post is so long....

Aaron Knight
Webmaster and Videographer
Team 891: Neverending Chaos...
http://first891.topcities.com
CHAMPIONSHIP PICTURES HAVE BEEN POSTED!!!!!!

Re: My 2 Cents
 

Yeah. I personally use lynx as a benchmark. If most of your stuff can be seen in lynx, you're fine. Lynx can even view PHP, although it runs into trouble with webforums and the like.

iCab, eh? I'll have to check it out. I use Safari because it's fast as lightning, but it's about as compatible as iMovie 3 with DOS.

--Petey

I too believe that the website award this year was week.

The reason I believe that team 19 won, is because it was first on the ballet. No other reason

Did you look at all the websites before you left? I didn't, because I didn't have time.
So if teams didn't look at it, whats the point on scoring them.

What I believe needs to be done is that first should have a computer there with every website in chronological order, so when teams are voting, they can see what is good and what is not. There should be a set deadline where your team packs its entire website in a .zip file and send it to FIRST. When you do this you eliminate the need for a web connection, and the possibility that the server might be down.

Re: My 2 Cents
 

I agree on what you said about the Flash should be used in an effective manner. I dont agree with the idea that you have something against websites that do have Flash intros.

Content isn't everything! Maybe some people LIKE browsing through the website to check out what some of the designers have as far as talent goes.

Maybe you have been turned off of Flash intros because of your dial-up, but then I find it hard to understand because I too am on dial-up and I find that intro's aren't that bad at loading.

I keep this stance because the site (http://www.stmichaelscollege.ca/robotics/) I won the Canadian Regional with has an intro that I spent a few days on. Many people thought that the intro was a fantastic part to explain what our team was about in a quick 15 second clip. For those people who are planning to learn how to make websites for next year I say USE Flash intros. It makes browsing through the long list of websites more interesting (and if they take longer I can just use the T3 connection at school :-p).

We considered programming a flash page for our website. We never did, but out solution to this bandwidth and compatibility problems was to have been a splash page with alternate pages--one flash for higher bandwidth users and one HTML for slowdem and non-flash users.

Splash pages are annoying, but incompatibility and slowness are even more so.

--Petey