[Brandon Martus]

3. The Website competition rules need to be clarified & expanded. There are a lot of fuzzy areas that can be interpreted many different ways. Some situations:

a) What happens if Suzy Senior makes a nice website, and then graduates, without winning the website award her senior year. But, the team wins the website award the year after, without changing Suzy's design. (possibly not changing anything) Does that count, because technically Suzy Senior wasn't on the team that year, so it wasn't created by a high school student that year.

b) What kind of pre-made open source / purchased software is allowed to be used? vBulletin, phpNuke, phpBB, vbPortal, etc. A team could install a pre-made system in 20 minutes which could look better than another team's website who spent hours more working on their site.

c) Just curious as to how many teams voted for the website competition at each regional. Was there alot of participation, or was it very sparse? I suggest using the team population to narrow the sites down to top 5, and then having FIRST judges look at the final ones to make a final decision. It was also suggested in another thread to have Yahoo.com or Amazon.com executive/designers judge the websites.

That's all I can think of right now.

This award is needed, because there are many great student designed websites out there. It worked out well this year, but I think it really needs some updating in order to continue to work in the future & be fair to everybody.