FIRST Website

[gondorf]

grr website is now annoying... cant find anything, keep getting shunted to pages i dont want, and cant find the 2005 docs. i was using those!

edit: by 2005 i mean the tetras. yes its old but i was building a vex robot to do that event.

[Jeremytice]

Looks pretty sweet.....takes a while to load though.

[JohnBoucher]

Originally Posted by JohnBoucher

The links to the team information pages are missing.

I submitted this question via website feedback and got a nice, quick reply that it is a pending fix.

[Pavan Dave]

At first I thought it was great but it is very laggy and has been very slow recently atleast for me and I have a Cable Modem.

Pavan.

[JaneYoung]

Originally Posted by Jessica Boucher

The official launch time isn't until 1pm. I would tack on a couple hours afterwards for getting everything settled.

Cool, that gives me time to go shopping for presents and a good cup of eggnog coffee. YaY.

[Justin]

FIRST Community. Tollerance of change. See the following thread.

Originally Posted by Jessica Boucher

Ah, the FIRST Community, aka The Land of Little Patience

The official launch time isn't until 1pm. I would tack on a couple hours afterwards for getting everything settled.

[et1337]

Bea-utiful.

But slow.

[Greg Marra]

I am finding it slow to load and harder to navigate than the old page. At first, I wasn't able to get to any sub-sections of the website because the Javascript hadn't loaded properly. Also, I am a bit worried about the main page's mousing over images changing the video link, since that seems entirely unintuitive with nothing labeled.

It seems that now that everything is actually loading properly for me that the page is pretty nice looking and not too hard to use, but I wish the contrast on some of the text was higher and that the site wasn't so completely reliant on Javascript. I don't see a site map at the bottom and I am worried how my Wii will handle browsing it.

Eww, and the Javascript navbars prevent me from ctrl-clicking links to open them in a new tab. It just uses Javascript to change the current page. I really dislike when sites do that. It makes them a lot harder for me to pull down massive amounts of information from at once, and really is completely not necessary.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Rob2713g

What does everyone else think?

I dislike it very much at this point. My personal preference would have been that they spend the time fixing/updating the old site instead of putting up a cumbersome, hard to navigate new site.

Plus, where is the History page? Information from past events was invaluable, and so far as I can see, it doesn't exist.

[sanddrag]

I have a question. I don't want to get blasted for this, but: What exactly does this new site offer over the old one?

[Corey Balint]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I have a question. I don't want to get blasted for this, but: What exactly does this new site offer over the old one?

It seems like theres less than before. The only thing that there seems to be more of is Promo stuff.

And as Cory stated, I loved all the history they had, even though they had very little as is. I would have loved to seen more, but I'm sure much of the records of previous events are just gone now.

[SamC]

I think with this new layout and site content, FIRST will get more recognition. With the old layout, a team could post a link to the site, but the non-FIRSTer would have to search really hard to even figure out what this whole thing is about, other than robots.

[AcesPease]

As far as I can tell there is NO WEBSITE at all.

[AcesPease]

Originally Posted by AcesPease

As far as I can tell there is NO WEBSITE at all.

Finally working. Not sure why it would not load yesterday. Seems like a pretty logical layout.

[RoboMom]

Sent up to website team. Keeping comments short and instructive will be very helpful.
12/06/06-From posts on http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...1&page=5&pp=15

1. "If you go to What's Going On In My Area? (the new team map) and look at FRC teams from X area, clicking on their team name now brings you to their personal website ... it doesn't give you the competitions they've attended, awards they've won, etc. I really liked being able to see that! I hope it comes back soon."
2. "I'm looking for the Form W9 and where to send it, but I can't seem to find it (and site search returns 0 results). "
3. "I wish the contrast on some of the text was higher and that the site wasn't so completely reliant on Javascript. I don't see a site map at the bottom and I am worried how my Wii will handle browsing it."
4. "the Javascript navbars prevent me from ctrl-clicking links to open them in a new tab. It just uses Javascript to change the current page. I really dislike when sites do that. It makes them a lot harder for me to pull down massive amounts of information from at once, and really is completely not necessary."
5) Nit-picky, but the contact pages' title (like top-of-the-browser-window title) is "Contact First", not "Contact FIRST"
6) cant find PDF of venue locations to aid hotel search
7)where is the History page? Information from past events was invaluable, and so far as I can see, it doesn't exist. I’m talking about the page that linked you to the results of every event from 2002-2005.
8) The results of past regionals and championship events. The format used on this page: http://web.archive.org/web/20060219...cs/abr_art1.htm was fantastic.
9. An intuitively organized archive of previous games that can be used for research and reference ( is needed).
10. 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.
11. 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.)
12. 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.
13. 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.)
14. 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.

15. 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.
16. 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]

17. 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.

18. 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.