New FIRST Beta site

[LeapsAndBowns]

Originally Posted by maths222

If you haven't already, I would encourage you to fill out the beta site feedback form (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FIRSTWebSurveyVersion2) FIRST is presumably providing this for a reason, and if you don't fill it out, they won't get your feedback.

Ditto. I'm sure the team working on this at FIRST is really interested in the feedback.

Coming from a design perspective, I personally think it's really beautiful visually and serves as a much better introduction to the organization than the current usfirst landing page. One tough thing with this thread is that all of us are coming from a perspective where we know FIRST well and want to find specific things that we're looking for, but a new website also needs to cater to people completely new to FIRST, which I think this website can do really well.

I work in a job where I'm often asked by parents how to get their kids involved with robotics, and showing them the current usfirst website can be a little overwhelming and confusing. The beta really lays out the opportunities for involvement simply (once I knew about the beta, I even used it instead of the normal site to introduce a few parents to FIRST).

While introducing new people to FIRST is super important, of course there needs to be easy navigation for students, teams, mentors, and volunteers, and I hope that these things are added to the site in the future. For the FTC section, it was pretty easy for me to navigate to the page where I'd find a game manual, but it probably could be cleaner and I'm trying to think of a way to incorporate that feedback into something useful for FIRST to hear on their feedback survey. (Maybe a link that points to a section "For Teams" the same way there are links set up for parents, educators, kids, and volunteers. There's also that 'coming soon' "My Dashboard" link which could be really exciting.)

Overall, I think it's really pretty and has a lot of potential to be a great new thing people see when they look up FIRST. I really look forward to seeing additions to it.