Website Dogfooding Request

[rachelholladay]

I'll drop a couple of notes:

Mentioned Lag: I wouldn't really consider it an issue. I'm using Chrome on Windows 8 and the only thing was I saw as the images loaded. Unless you aren't sizing the images compatible to what they are normally displayed as (therefore making the browser re-size) you are fine.

General Structure: Pretty solid and clean. The header is well made in that it gives the team name, number and logo. I assume your team colors are blue, dark blue and yellow? The grey sidebars next to the white background did make me think I was viewing a PDF for a second. I like the consistency in layout across the site and the nav bar seemed to work and look fine. This is probably a bit more of a personal opinion, but I'm used to seeing the 'About Us' type tabs as one of the first (left to right) and the 'Contact Us' tab being last. You have four team's website linked at the bottom and while I'm love supporting other teams, its a little unclear why those four are directly linked on every page. Are they sister teams?

Homepage: The spinning gallery is eye-catching and if there is a way to add captions that would be even better. I liked the prominent links to social medias and the twitter feed, always a nice touch. Glancing through the home page there seems to be no reference to where the team is geographically, so it would be nice to list your school, town or state. Also, many team pages have a short intro paragraph on their website saying a little bit about who they are, what FIRST is and what they do.

Team: I really, really liked the detail given to the robots. Each page has several pictures, it gives the breakdown of basic info for people who know what they are looking for and yet you also provide the more user-friendly explanation that would help people new to FIRST. The mentor page has the title of 'welding' which seems a bit odd, but I'm assuming the picture below showcase your mentors mentoring. The method of listing the student member was fairly personalized and the lightboxes are a nice effect.

Media: I was not expecting to be linked to external sites (in the case of Youtube for videos and the gallery for pictures). If all your videos are on Youtube it makes sense to use it, but I would suggest making the link target="_blank" so that even when the user is redirected to Youtube, your team website still stays up in their tabs, making ti more likely that they will continue to browse your site. Same thing for the gallery. I realize its not really an 'external' site but it is structured differently and therefore, at first glance, gives the appearance of being at least a bit external. The method of storing pictures through the gallery does seem to work well. I like its system. The fact that you have a page to distribute your team graphics is very professional, nice branding. I'm on the fence on whether 'Team Graphics' would be more descriptive than just 'Graphics'. Eh, your call.

Sponsors: I like it. It's bold.

History: Keeping it all on one page with the use of tabs is very lovely, it groups it together with less clicking and less scrolling. The paragraphs seem relatively small, but they do get the information across and there is something to be said for brevity (which I have the tendency to lack..)

Contact Us: Solid and interactive. Got love those Google widgets. Speaking of which, no team calendar?

About Us: This too has the boldness of the sponsor page. Although it is the second time around..

As a side note, because this is Chief Delphi, every time I read the name of this thread, I mentally read 'Watchdog error'.