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New Website
Another new website for our team and personally it looks good. Too bad the forums and image gallery probably don't work right now.:D
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maybe you wanna put up the link so you can get some feedback on it? ;)
ps - 1089 is working on a new website, it can be previewed here: http://www.geocities.com/bandchick9903/home.htm the links do not work, and i am aware that all the images are not working either. it is just a general template idea. i would appreciate some feedback (from anyone but anthony (aignam)). thanks in advance. sara "the girl" and the webmaster of 1089 |
I'm guessing its the 'www' button under his post.
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shhh...i wasn't smart enough to think of that :p
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Bandchick: Why do people feel the need to redefine the cursor for mousing over links? I think its pointless and just plain aggravating.
The logo is a little fuzzy (something town high school?) and the same could be said of your navigation (fuzzy, still readable though.) I'd get a gif of the logo. Maybe hunt for a cleaner font for the navigation? Especially because the rest of the website has a very clean look, the grungey font is just weird. JamesWU: Very minimalistic. Its a pity that you made it with tables and not css, or I wouldn't have much to complain about. Only major beef is that on the subpages you don't make it clear where you are. (IE: click on the content link. I don't see 'Content" on that page outside of the navigation links) |
Y all the hate for tables
css is good tho... I'll make navigation more clear.
Also when anyone who posts critiques should also metion what regional their going to. |
Re: Y all the hate for tables
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Wait a sec. Some minor coding beefs that may come back to haunt you. You have a <center> tag before an <html> tag? and no </html> closing tag? Maybe you should double-check what you have and want there... Colours should be defined with a # in front or you might find some breakages. Attribute values should be in quotes. Otherwise, a nicely done website.
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Although most of the problems it returned have already been mentioned, I suggest running your page through http://validator.w3c.org/ to make sure it'll show up the same in every browser :)
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Thanks for telling me about the validator service but the link was wrong...No biggie. Also, Yes...I will beat up anyone who gives me bad opinions. BTW...Watch out my regional's the Pacific Northwest one.
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Anyhow, is that PHP-Nuke/Post-Nuke running under your site? :( I hope not...the rules (I think) disqualify it if it's not completely student created and maintained...right? (I didn't read them very closely last year...) |
Well, we originally used phpnuke until we found out we couldn't use it so we started learning php by looking at about every...single...php...tutorial on the net. php.net isn't very informative it's just a reference. But good times.
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w00t!w00t! the site is bigger...haters:mad:
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We were using phpBB, too, until we found out we couldn't use it either :( I had to code a (not as fancy admittedly, but functional) solution for our upcoming new site... PHP.NET is a great reference, but their tutorials are less than useful...I just popped open some free code and random tutorials until I found out how to do the basics then just toyed around and used php.net as a reference until I've gotten to be pretty decent ;) |
Oh eek one more thing, click on the banner :(
404 error... |
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
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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...
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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? |
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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.... |
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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?
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The background is too saturated. Dim the color. Leaves my eyes dazzled.
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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?
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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). |
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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! |
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[ 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... |
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There's that word again - fair. Is it fair it's not a student only built robot, is it fair they have more money, more mentors... Quote:
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Dean Kamen, "It’s rare to see students from Middle School, High School, College, working at something very intense along with parents, teachers, engineers, mentors, professionals, from a whole community, because I think it’s an unintended consequence of the culture of America, but we’re really good at efficiently separating all those people which is why I think so many kids never think about science or engineering students are separated very early in life, they go to school engineers are in laboratories or companies, manufacturing floors. students rarely get to see what real scientists, engineers and professionals do. This is extraordinary, that’s why it’s important. When kids get out of school at the end of the day, their interaction with adults: maybe it’s television; seeing what we call superstars, or superheroes; not realistic representations. They have parents that are working hard these days, probably both of them working; maybe two jobs. For all sorts of reasons that I can’t explain, it’s pretty clear to me that it’s a rare event that students get to really interact with the real heroes, the real professionals, that build this country; that provide our standard of living, that are working toward your own and their own futures; it’s perhaps good news and bad news about FIRST. The fact that we can uniquely put all these people in a room, and allow all these students to interface and interact with all these very real people, it seems to me is what makes FIRST so special and it is why every year I ask you to what I’m going to ask you to do again. But it’s for the first time this year that I realize that while our board struggles with how we can grow bigger, faster, it’s the good new and the bad news of FIRST. The most unique and important characteristic is it tears town the separations that are so efficiently put in our society to keep all these groups separated. Which means then that the only way that FIRST will work is if we keep all of these engineers and mentors and teachers and parents and students together. That’s a very labor intensive exercise. It requires enormous effort by individual people. It doesn’t scale up unless every time we get more students, we get more mentors, so that the constant is the ability to put real, important heroes of our culture in direct contact with the students and have them all working hand in hand on a project; all figuring out what’s really possible; all with gracious professionalism. Well, if that’s the nub of it, and it’s gonna continue in my mind to take this extraordinary effort by all of the people that have made this possible for all of the students; this personally individual effort I will ask you what I ask you by tradition every year: all the students, stand up and look right at those mentors and professionals and teachers and parents and thank them for what they’re doing for you." Portions of Speech by Dean Kamen 1998 FIRST Competition Kickoff Workshop, January 10, 1998 |
Is it just me, or does every thread turn into a discussion about the 'ideals of FIRST'?
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hence the reason why i don't read or post as much as i used to.
*shrugs* |
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Indeed. Enough about what's 'fair' and anything else besides for Websited Criticism. What do you think of the website(s) mentioned here?
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bandchick: I must agree the 'grunge' font really needs to be sharpened up a bit... :( It might be my display, but I find it a little hard to read at times... |
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My team wants to have two sites a flash and an html version. It'd help if they helped or at least gave me ideas. For the flash version I was wundering what it would look like and how it would work. I've been toying around with an www.ego7.com style look. Desktop fullscreen and pixelly. The other option is a toon-like fun vectorish playground area. The latter would create a whimsical feel which isn't the current feel of our team, but it would challenge me more and have more possibilities. http://www.robyn-productions.co.uk/ is a great example of this. Please give your views on it.
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oh my god! i never thought i'd say this, but i agree with anthony mangia
(anthony, you better quote that, because you will NEVER see it again!) |
Your right about the toonier site being hard to navigate through it just looks so cool. I'm probably going to just put flash experements on the site too. Then i can post my studies and stuff. Also Everyone should go and play my game on my website. www.wahsrobotics.com/modules.php?name=Games Post your critiques or even better praises of it. thanx
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Also, speaking of flash, Does anyone know why mac users can't play the game? All they get is an error page.
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I'd like to disagree. Nowadays as more and more people are getting MicroSoft XP and more powerful computers. They don't need to set their resolutions at 800*600 unless they're blind. Windows XP also has huge fonts and icons so it is almost necessary to have your res at higher than 800*600, which is the minimum.
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WindowsXP has nothing to do with resolution. :P And I'm running WinXP without all the pretty icons. My text is fairly small (really high res, middling-size screen)
I'd rather have sites be usable at lower resolutions than ignoring them altogether because people who have older computers "Should Upgrade". Coming from a "rawr, webstandards should be the only way to do things" perspective, I tend to hate flash because it makes information hard to access, impossible to bookmark and sometimes held to the whim of a designer who will probably not read his information all that much (and is thus more concerned about "does it look cool animating in" than "is the text actually readable") |
i didn't understand the last post it was cornfusing. so what are you trying to say.
Back to the website, if you've gone in the last couple of days you've seen it's taken a turn for the worse. The main problem is that I don't have a goood idea of what the site should look like. |
Which paragraph was hard to understand? :P
Ignore first, its a side comment. 2) I think in an ideal world webpages would scale well on low resolutions. (Ever use a pocket pc to surf the 'net? Too many people have hardcoded table designs that make life... painful) 3) Flash is bad as a means of presenting information. Most flash menus tend to be badly thought out. I prefer links, its an idea thats simple and works, and requires little mouse control (as opposed to digging through multi-level flyout menus...) This is mainly an argument for non-dynamic menus. See my team's site: http://www.mvrt.org/ I wanted the webmaster to change the idea. People couldn't figure out that the strange boxes were menus, and you have to be careful about moving toward the links, if you move diagonally, you mess it up and a different menu has appeared. |
I didn't really understand your side comment the one about windows having nothing to do with resolution. It has a huge amount to do with resolution. Most windows XP users have their resolution set at least 1024*768 because of XP's large fonts. 1024*768 XP looks about the same size as 800*600 '98. Some of this is because of better technology but most is because 800*600 XP looks bad and is just massive on most people's computers.
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Does this rule includes small modules either?
We have a guestbook script installed. If it´s not allowed, I´d better start writing a guestbook in PHP! |
I believe its more an issue of better technology. When I got my win98 laptop, 1600x1200 resolution was out of the question. When I got my new moniter for my desktop (winXP) 1600x1200 was an option. I've run win98 @ 1600x1200, it looked about the same as XP...
XP's fonts are just as big as older windows IMO. I think what you're talking about is the UI elements like the titlebar, close/minimize/maximize buttons being larger. And they really aren't noticably so. |
Re: New Website
Check ou the <a href="http://wahsrobotics.com">website</a>again...We opted for a clean look and we will keep working to polish up the look. Also check out the flash site it's rather spiffing.
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Re: New Website
Not bad. I'm not a huge fan of the image on the opening page. The fade-to-black thing doesn't quite finish and looks out of place.
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I do see a lot of effort though, so good job! |
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As far as the flash site, it's fullscreen (duh), and that's bad. Full screen and pop-up sites are evil. The text wasn't quite readable. I do like the whole concept of it, it just need a little more work concerning the way contents are displayed... just my 2 canadian cents :) |
Re: New Website
What kind of person wouldn't be able to understand a windows os style interface?* But...Good Critiques for the most part. I will try to fix the bad readability of the fonts. I was wondering tho why do all the people who post have a problem with popup websites and or non w3c compliant websites.. I would like to see one person who isn't able to see the website because of noncompliancy.
*btw pedro did you know that you can draw the windows around so they don't only show up in the corner? |
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New windows break back buttons and play havoc with usability--especially for people that know what they're doing when they browse. I sometimes get angry when this stuff happens overly. If I want a new window I'll shift-click it and not have an HTML document decide how I'm going to look at it. I think it's common sense. Requested popups are almost as bad as unrequested popups (which I don't get) and really are some of the most useless design elements ever; what possible use can a target="_blank" do for your document except annoy and confuse the reader? I would argue that there is no case in which taking over someone's browser is justified. So many people want to make their websites a huge 'visual experience,' usually the people that say, 'I'm making a new layout' every couple of months. I say there's nothing wrong with a nice-looking site, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that bloat is bad, and should never detract from content. The vast majority of 'web designers' that say things about their 'new layout' tend not to care about some of the important issues in web design. Often this is a result of them being deficient at markup and good at Photoshop or programming and trying to make up for it with the latter two. I'd even argue that overuse of Javascript, tables, Flash, and images for text (again, the 'new layout' bunch comes to mind) will also hurt you in the long run, and I've yet to see someone prove me wrong in the slightest. W3C standards serve one purpose above all, which is to refine and improve the status quo of web documents. They do this by putting everyone on the same page (for example IE, Mozilla, Opera all support W3C standards and thus will theoretically render the page flow similarly) and then improving on that standard systematically. This acts as incentive for many savvy web designers (although it probably isn't always necessary to a grand extent) to help improve their site's content, because they realize standard pages are there for their best interests, such as serving documents to multiple media, making documents cross-agent compatible, and improving search engine rankings. Instead of asking 'why use standards', we should be asking 'why not use standards'; if they truly aren't necessary for whatever is being accomplished (which is very rare), then don't use standards; oftentimes, the reasoning behind not using standards is because they are supposedly difficult to learn (they aren't at all), and yield few tangible benefits. |
Re: New Website
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