text is pretty small. I'd suggest setting it to just 76% of default.

(thus: body { font-size: 76% } )

below 75% the browsers get sorta... weird.

Wait!!! We can't use phpBB??? What if the site is our own but the forums are premanufactured? I hope we can use phpBB because making forums seems like a daunting task. Anyways, I was also wondering if the image gallery "Gallery" is fair game

According to the rules (taken in a very literal sense) it has to be COMPLETELY student made.

Here's the paragraph I'm referring to:
"The Website Design Award recognizes excellence in student-designed, built, and managed
FIRST team websites. Eligible websites are judged/scored PRIOR to the competition by “student
judges”. Student judges from each FIRST team determine the winner via ballot submitted on site
at the regional competition from each FIRST team." (FIRST Awards Manual, Section 7)

Well, that's really taken to the letter, and is not how the criteria are meant to be judged. The spirit of that rule is that they don't want mentors or Brandon Martuses :D working on the website, not that they want students to have to make every single module. Very few people could make a forum truly worth using by themselves for example. Not in any reasonable amount of time anyway. In other words, phpBB is fine...

I don't mean to sound rude, mean, or morose, but I don't see why we should judge this award any different from anything else. The Autodesk rules are very plain and are read to the letter. The same goes for the actual competition rules. I'm lost as to why we shouldn't read these rules to the letter?

Example: Let's say CD wasn't run by a mentor. A student ran it. Could they enter it then, even though the bulk of their site is prefabricated by vBulletin?

I highly doubt that, Brandon has put so many extra features in here, that even if you have to judge it on just that then it would be awesome!

As for the rules, they might change, I don't think the rules for website design award have been posted this year yet!!

Remember, anything and everything within the FIRST world can change at a moments notice. (Even award judging criteria!)

Need I remind everyone on the move of Nationals from Florida??

Who thought they would stay there forever, or just never thought about the fact that they would move it????

....

Exactly....

I disagree. I taught myself php from php.net only. I downloaded the CHM file and looked at the examples. A good background in HTML helped things, but the php was all on my own. Sure, it isn't the easiest way to learn it, but sometimes thats the way it goes. It reminded me alot of first. When our tema started animation we were all clueless and had to just mess around before getting things to work the way we wanted. I think it helps build your ability to problem solve :). I'm not trying to take anything away from your learning method, im just trying to put out the point that php.net can be useful and used as a learning tool. :)

Yeah, so I'll hop on the bandwagon. You can check out Team 25's new page at www.raiderrobotix.org. Any comments/suggestions/criticism would be appreciated. The problems I can pick out right now is, of course, the semi-incomplete content (we're still working on that), the use of only 2-colors, and perhaps, the size, which may not be viewable for certain resolutions. What do you think?

The background is too saturated. Dim the color. Leaves my eyes dazzled.

What about Gallery, the very fashionable image gallery to use thesse days. Do you think it is okay for us to use it? I don't want to learn how to use ImageMagick or NetPBM...that is, unless it's easy. Is it?

Define easy ;)

You shouldn't need to learn either of those if you learn GD, which really isn't THAT hard. PHP.NET is a good place to start looking for GD info, but also the GD website, and if all else fails Google for it! :)

Back to your question about using it, if we interpret these rules with the same degree of precision as we interpret every other set of rules, then no you can not use Gallery (if you want to compete).

We don't read robot contact rules to the letter either though. In both cases, the spirit of the rule is more important than what it explicitly states. 0 team websites are 100% student-built, so a resonable cutoff must be made by looking at why this clause is in the rule.

I would argue yes. First off, this site consists of much more than vBulletin, let me just put that out, but the practicality of a site, in addition to how much is student-made, should be taken into account. Remember also that this isn't a learned panel of judges, but a bunch of kids determining the award. Not that I really care.

Right on! In addition, imo, the point of the web award is to get more team webs posted, give students opportunity to learn web design, perhaps learn from mentors, more effectively be able to share what teams are doing, get more FIRST effectively spread around...

Each FIRST team is not required to build the robot within rigid guidelines of student only built for good reason - every team's talents and resources are different, the point is not that only students built it, the point is that they are learning often from the mentors they're working with.

*puzzled* I don't know about the other team forum meetings after competitions, but I hear at the one our mentors went to the consensus was to get rid of the award all together, or don't have students vote on the award.

*salute* resuming disorder, sir!

I beg to differ.

I'm not sure how you can charge that not a single website in the FIRST organization is 100% student. I know the site that won our regional award last year was definitely student built. The local team sites (not ours from last year, but others) were completely student built.

Perhaps "bulk" was the wrong word. CD's most prominent feature (obviously the forums) was pre-fabricated by vBulletin. Yes, Brandon has added things (very nicely might I add), but the fact remains that the most used feature is still the forums which are pre-fabricated. In this light, you could say that a team that's very famous for its FIRST news syndication could throw out a phpNuke site and beat out a team that spent many hours building a site from scratch. Fair? I think not.

[ Please note: I don't mean to bash CD. I want to thank Brandon and all the moderators that make this happen for allowing us to convene on a single medium to discuss things. Using vBulletin probably is the best solution for this site, but the fact stand it shouldn't be allowed to compete. ]

I dont mean to seem like the award is all that matters. What I'm trying to show everyone is that the website competition needs to be fair for everyone. Allowing people to used advanced, prefabricated modules (and/or templates) is simply out of the question because some teams simply opt to do what the rules say and build it from scratch. This isn't to say the teams who use the pre-fab stuff will be at a terrible advantage (some teams have some really talented coders that can easily code with the best of them), but it's merely to say that if you can't put the effort in and learn enough on your own to make the website advanced and pretty, why should you be allowed to compensate with someone else's knowledge and work? The spirit of the award is to inspire you to learn and expand your web design knowledge and skills and apply those in a real world environment, and I think allowing people to use pre-fab stuff is defeating the entire spirit and purpose behind this competition.

Just my two cen--OK closer to 8 cents worth...