[jonathan lall]

It wasn't taken that seriously at the Canadian Regional. St. Mike's had the best site, and IMO nobody came close.

Putting aside the fact that it's a pretty irrelevant award (except it might be good for the Webmaster's--and only his/her--ego), one must look at it this way: team members cannot be trusted to vote on an award that has any bearing on anything. If I was to make a criterion, "the site must be 100% student-built" I run into different definitions of 'built' and of 'student,' and each person has his or her own. This doesn't prevent them from voting based on their interpretations. If someone put a nice shell around OpenFIRST, it'd be difficult to judge. What if I said it must be cross-browser compatible, or must follow good coding practices? Then you would get a storm of arguments in every which way as to what that means, in addition to the fact that most webmasters do not actually know what that means. Are team members voting on how nice it looks, or how useful it is? Or are they voting on how well it showcases the team and its sponsors? Or are they trying to assess how well it helps other teams? Worse still, we're getting non-experts to vote; that is, we could have someone new to HTML and server-side coding, or someone who hasn't seen all the sites be the deciding vote. This is why FIRST decided to make it not matter, and it was a good decision. They only made the award because of the theme of FIRST, and because they realized how many neat sites there were.

It's a cool award to win, but I wouldn't take it too seriously. As you said, a lot of undeserving sites got the awards, and my point is that there's no way to get around it. I wouldn't be surprised if it happened again.