Thread: FIRST Website
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Unread 06-12-2006, 01:33
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AKA: Arthur Dutra IV; NERD #18
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Re: FIRST Website

After a lot of guess-and-checking URLs to see if there is any actual content there, I finally found the Sitemap for their website.

http://www.usfirst.org/sitemap.aspx

And if that was not enough, I was playing around with the URL variable parameters in the my.usfirst.org section of their website, when I just tried eliminating them all together to see what I get. If you go to the following link, it's like a sitemap of all FIRST events.

https://my.usfirst.org/myarea/index.lasso

Here's the complete team list for this season:

https://my.usfirst.org/myarea/index.lasso?page=teamlist


I do enjoy the new look of the website; the layout and color choices are good ones. But, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.


Here's my healthy dose of constructive criticism:

1. If you disable Javascript, none of the page navigation links work - or even appear. This is bad, especially if users attempt to disable JS during Kickoff to make the site load faster.

2. There needs to be much better page titles. The one for the homepage is simply "Home" or "USFIRST.org". A much better one would include "FIRST" or something to that nature in every page title, as well as relevant page title, such as "USFIRST.org - Home" or "USFIRST.org - Documents and Updates", etc. This will help search engines as well as tabbed browsing. (Having a half dozen tabs all open with the same "USFIRST.org" title is quite confusing.)

3. All of the old content needs to find it's way back onto the new FIRST website, such as match results and other similar material from previous seasons.

4. Although it would probably mean a ton of work, there should be server-side redirects to redirect everyone from the old pages to the new content. (Such as if I visit http://www.usfirst.org/about/ it should redirect me to where ever the new page resides. There are so many links to FIRST pages over the years that the dead links will just be a nightmare for thousands of visitors.)

5. A better Error 404 page. Simply telling us "page cannot be found" is not enough. How about a page with the standard FIRST header and footer, with a blurb in the content section about how there was an Error 404 and the page you were looking for could not be found. Then have links there to the home, sitemap, and search pages.

6. All page navigation needs tabbed browsing support. Every browser nowadays except Internet Explorer 6 supports tabbed browsing. Not being able to open content from the navigation in new tabs is quite annoying. (This is the same as Greg's Ctrl-Click criticism.) In fact, I almost believe that all the page navigation elements are not actual <a href="..."> types of links. If I right click on one, I don't get the usual Open, Open in new Tab, Open in New Window, options. This is telling me that they are using Javascript to do the links in the page nav menus instead of semantic HTML code, which seems just plain weird.

7. All the individual team content pages from the old usfirst.org/frc/map/ needs to make it's way into the current team system on their website. Although I enjoy clicking on a team and being taken directly to their website, I think a much better option would still have three columns, but with a slight bit of additional content for each team in the center column.

ABC Engineering & XYZ Corporation & Someville High School
<-- [Link this to the team information page]
Team Website <-- [Link this line directly to the team's website]
8. It would be nice if the https://my.usfirst.org/myarea/index.lasso pages all had links back to the main FIRST website somewhere near the top. A simple small FIRST logo in the top left corner would suffice.

9. We need photo and video galleries; and not just Flash ones. It would be nice to have ones like this where one can browse and click on/download JPEG pictures. Although the Flash galleries are nice, I'd much rather have at least the option of viewing the gallery in Flash or in an HTML page with JPEG pictures. Taking screenshots of Flash to extract the pictures out of them is not fun. :-/

I guess that turned out a little longer that I thought it would, but hopefully these little things can be resolved before the onslaught of Kickoff traffic to the FIRST website.
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Art Dutra IV
Robotics Engineer, VEX Robotics, Inc., a subsidiary of Innovation First International (IFI)
Robowranglers Team 148 | GUS Robotics Team 228 (Alumni) | Rho Beta Epsilon (Alumni) | @arthurdutra

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