Team website

[Ed Law]

I agree with all the things that others have said so far. Wow, they must have spent an hour typing those comments.

I was a volunteer judge for the website award for one of the competition events. My team also decided to go all out to win the Best Website award because that is the only award we would have a chance to win comparing to the other ones. We spent a lot of time reading the judging criteria and looking at all the websites of recent regional/district Best Website Award winners. We analyzed the common traits of good websites and unique things that probably stood out to judges. You are welcome to take a look at our website at www.team2834.com. It is not perfect because I left it to the student webmaster how she wanted to present it. Engineers do not tell artists what to do.

I just want to give some general feedback. A good website requires three elements like a three-legged stool. It needs to be balanced. It requires technical, organizational and artistic skills. I am very impressed with your technical skills, perhaps you were trying to showcase too much of it. Organizational refers to how the site is organized, where do you put the information and is it relevant. Artistic is just that, a webpage is a piece of art. Our webmaster labors through each page to make the picture the perfect size, location relative to the text and focal points when the page is first loaded. It is like a painting.

I know some people are going to disagree with me on this. I found a lot of the good websites have a single webmaster or a main person who makes the decision with others helping. I don't know of any famous artwork that is done by more than one person. Consistency is very important. The font, layout, color scheme and theme have to be consistent. When I was judging teams' websites, I can tell which ones are done by one main person and which ones are done by separate students who did not talk to each other.

It really depends on your objective whether you are trying to do well in the website competition or just try to learn as much technical stuff as possible. I hope this helps.