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!!!!!!