[ScottOliveira]

First, I would advise people not to try to make this a comparison between 1777 and 1710. That's not quite in the spirit of gracious professionalism. Just evaluate the site on it's own merits.

Also, I would highly recommend putting your sites from past years (assuming you have been changing the site) into separate subdirectories to be showcased, and moving those awards for best website to a different location. This helps keep the judges from thinking you're just resubmitting an award winning website.

You have a very symmetrical website, with similar areas for buttons, for next/previous images, the quick news and upcoming dates, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. However then you have the inventor model and visualization animation, which are slightly offset from each other. I think this goes against the feel of the rest of the site, and would look nicer if you lined them up.

You make extensive use of images for buttons up at the top, and then you have simple text links for next image and previous image, both of which are fairly major buttons (leaving text links at the very bottom for a secondary navigation is fine, and fairly common). It would look nicer and more consistent if you replaced both of those with image buttons, similar to on your top nav bar.

Also, your repeatingboxbackground (the background for the quick news and upcoming dates titles) extends all the way across the page. It loads before your main picture (the one in your slideshow), so it briefly displays black background with the grey bar all the across until the image loads. I would highly recommend changing that, because it gives a bad look on your first impression of the site.

Actually, you ight want to consider moving upcoming dates and quick news onto the same side. With the two elements facing each other like that, it feels like the page is being constricted and squeezed. Having them stacked on one side might make it feel a little more open.

Then you have your light dimming/raising which is a really nifty idea. However, using it forces you to reload the page every time. Maybe consider just using javascript to change the background image instead of reloading the entire page.

On all of the index pages in the directories within /2009/team/ you have the same left navbar among those pages. Again you have a prominent page feature using simple plain text links, not even a stylized font. It would look nice if you spiced those up somehow, either images, or changing the font and size.

Your logo at the top of every page (/2009/images/navigation/1710logo.png) is rather small, which makes it too hard to read the team name. I would suggest either trying to expand the image horizontally, and enlarge the text, or perhaps remove Ravonics Revolution from that graphic and put it someplace else on the site (Maybe push everything else down a bit and give a separate line to the name? But you would have to be careful about having too much blank space to the sides).

Hope those ideas help a bit, if I see anything else I'll add it later.