Website Design & Functionality Awards

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by aechmtwash11

Personally FIRST needs to make sure that teams that win website awards are not pre-made sites like wordpress and etc. I hate when a team obviously uses a pre-made system and just has a crap load of content. Anyone can type words into a text field.

A few things.
1. Websites are not evaluated based on the amount of content. Too much content laid out in a confusing manner is a common criticism. What's more desired is content that's organized and laid out properly, with accessible navigation between pages.

2. If my pre-made website lets me focus more on content that is concise, easy to find, and plentiful, while my site is easier to navigate than a custom solution, why should you get the trophy for having, for all intents and purposes, a worse website?

3. When you visit Wikipedia, Chief Delphi, the White House, PostSecret, the Huffington Post, The Drudge Report, or FiveThirtyEight, along with nearly every blog on the internet, is your experience on these websites made at all worse by the fact that the engines powering them were not written from the ground up for that website?

Sorry about the long post, this is a bit of a touchy subject for me.

[aechmtwash11]

I agree there are some awesome pre-made systems out there. However in the spirit of FIRST students should do the work.

Also, one of FRC's main goals is to give students a feel for the activities that surround a successful business. I have never seen any company that uses a premade system for their websites!

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by aechmtwash11

I agree there are some awesome pre-made systems out there. However in the spirit of FIRST students should do the work.

Also, one of FRC's main goals is to give students a feel for the activities that surround a successful business. I have never seen any company that uses a premade system for their websites!

Several companies do just that. I had a bunch of examples above, but I'll go ahead and pull a few more up.

Fast Company, MTV UK, The Economist, and The White House all use Drupal as the basis for their web site. Samsung, Wearable Print, and Radium Labs are great examples of Wordpress sites. Countless more are edited with both of these tools, Dreamweaver, or other CMSes.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by aechmtwash11

I agree there are some awesome pre-made systems out there. However in the spirit of FIRST students should do the work.

Also, one of FRC's main goals is to give students a feel for the activities that surround a successful business. I have never seen any company that uses a premade system for their websites!

(Emphasis Mine)

A website is a tool, precisely how you use that tool lies entirely within your team. While 397 had a website we used Wordpress. This is not because we didn't have mentors or students more than capable of writing a webpage from scratch (I did websites professionally for the last couple years). We used it because we wanted to have a functional website that was intuitive for any member of our team to add information to. Remember what I said about it being a tool? The purpose of a website is to allow people to access the data they want in an efficient manner. We felt the most efficient way was to utilize a framework designed for that.

Now, for the part I emphasized. FIRST is not about education. You can argue this all you want but until FIRST changes its name to FERST (For Education and Recognition of Science and Technology) I will stand by that my job as a mentor is to inspire and not always educate. FRC should never be all mentors or all students but a mixture of the two working together inspiring each other. That is the spirit of FIRST.

[Kims Robot]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

(Emphasis Mine)
...FIRST is not about education...

Ironic then that FIRST just sent out an email about voting for them in the TakePart Challenge as listed under Education...

I don't disagree with the mentor/student balance thing, just bringing up a point that it is about education. Education can be in many forms: lecturing, showing, doing, etc. We are educating students in what it is like to be an engineer, and exposing them to science & technology.

Not sure I have a formal opinion about canned websites & awards. Coding HTML is becoming ancient. Just like we don't sit down and write assembly to program our robots. If someone can efficiently use a tool to come up with a great design that conveys their information, that's just like real life.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Kims Robot

Ironic then that FIRST just sent out an email about voting for them in the TakePart Challenge as listed under Education...

I don't disagree with the mentor/student balance thing, just bringing up a point that it is about education. Education can be in many forms: lecturing, showing, doing, etc. We are educating students in what it is like to be an engineer, and exposing them to science & technology.

Not sure I have a formal opinion about canned websites & awards. Coding HTML is becoming ancient. Just like we don't sit down and write assembly to program our robots. If someone can efficiently use a tool to come up with a great design that conveys their information, that's just like real life.

True, viewing inspiration as a form of education is a new concept to me. Thanks for pointing that out.

(And as a brief aside, I actually was writing assembly code earlier today...ok, it was for a class.)

[KathieK]

The evaluators spend 45-60 minutes per site, minimum. It's difficult to find enough judges who have knowledge about websites, but no connections to individual teams so that each site gets the required 4-5 evaluations. The Regionals that I am involved with have many teams submitting so each evaluator is assigned anywhere from 12-20 sites. An advantage is that the evaluations are done online so I can use people from other parts of the country who are not affiliated with my teams, but the disadvantage is that we're completely anonymous - no recognition is ever given, the judges are not acknowledged in person.

http://www.usfirst.org/uploadedFiles...20 manual.pdf our evaluation system is almost exactly as written here in your criteria for the award. The custom coding question is only one of many things that you are ranked on. I don't think the intent was to exclude CMS use but rather, to encourage web design and not using a template commonly available (I know I didn't say that correctly...) But I can see where you're coming from and will mention it to FIRST.

[likzuz]

As for the reviews, you are right it is very specific. I just wish it was accompanied with a "this is what the national reviewers would consider a 4" or a 2 or a 3.

I'm not knocking FIRST. I realize how tough it is to find volunteers and they are doing a great job as it is. I just wish their was examples and standards set for the judges to base off of. A lot of it is subjective and one person's 4 is another person's 2.

Overall though I'm glad how much consideration FIRST puts towards websites. Call me a true FIRST kid but I just wish things were more objective =P. No matter what though we'll keep hacking away at the websites we make and it is a huge learning experience. The php/web design/Cold Fusion/etc. I've learned has been more than any class could teach me.

[rsisk]

Some objective standards can be applied to website judging fairly easily. There are sites that show if a site meets HTML standards and accessibility standards.

Bringing in a subjective viewpoint in the judging moves the websites in a direction to answer the question of how the general public would view the site which is important. The subjective nature of the judging is tempered by the fact that several judges review the site and their scoring is averaged to help mitigate any outliers. This also helps smooth out the scoring system where some judges tend to score higher or lower than others.

[Dustin Shadbolt]

I agree with Andrew. I used Joomla for our site but I'm now thinking about switching to wordpress. Even though I'm not on the team as a student but as a mentor/helper, I'm still planning the site. We are a small team, and need a website that can function. I'm sure I could hand code a site from scratch (I have experience) but that would limit me and the programming student to being the only one to update it. I'm sure the students are still inspired to do the work, but they also learn the fact that they can use pre-built frameworks. It's all about choosing the right tools for the job. Imo that is what should matter the most in the website category. Using a CMS doesn't mean you don't know how to "code", but it shows that you can evaluate the situation and choose the best tool to complete your task. And plus you can add custom plugins and a custom theme.

Just my thoughts.

[likzuz]

To Chris is Me, Not everyone at the regional judges it. The Web/Animation/Graphic Mentor for our team judged at Kansas City this year and he was given only a few websites to look at. Seeing as Web was his job he graded fairly critically knowing what to expect out of these websites. The one team he said had it all ended up losing to a team that was judged by an easier judge. It's just not fair to them.

As to those who are talking about Content Management Systems, eg. Wordpress, Joomla, Etc, it's up to you. Team 1710 has built their own CMS for the last two years and it is an amazing learning experience. I think it's fine if you use a CMS that is already made but if two websites are equal in terms of content, graphics and functionality but one used a CMS while the other made theirs. I think the one who made theirs should win because of the effort.

As for FIRST not being about educating, I must whole heartedly disagree. I've learned so much from my mentors and this is what has made FIRST unique to me. What's the point of building a robot/website/animation/business plan if you never learn anything from it? You can inspire people all you want but until they are educated it's all useless.

[likzuz]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

A few things.
1. Websites are not evaluated based on the amount of content. Too much content laid out in a confusing manner is a common criticism. What's more desired is content that's organized and laid out properly, with accessible navigation between pages.

2. If my pre-made website lets me focus more on content that is concise, easy to find, and plentiful, while my site is easier to navigate than a custom solution, why should you get the trophy for having, for all intents and purposes, a worse website?

3. When you visit Wikipedia, Chief Delphi, the White House, PostSecret, the Huffington Post, The Drudge Report, or FiveThirtyEight, along with nearly every blog on the internet, is your experience on these websites made at all worse by the fact that the engines powering them were not written from the ground up for that website?

Sorry about the long post, this is a bit of a touchy subject for me.

While what you say is correct I have one thing to say about the process.

When it comes to the website award a lot of the scores are subjective. Where it says rate them 1-4 it's completely up to the person to set standards. So you can have two different people rating two different websites. If the guy on the left thinks this website is worthy of an 80 while the other one is worth a 90 it doesn't matter because he only rates one website. While the other guy might say his website, the one the other guy said was a 90, is an 80 and the other is a 70.

The problem comes that the judges don't get to rate all the websites. They are given a batch to grade and that is that. They aren't given standards or other websites to compare it to. I've seen teams that whole heartedly deserved to win with a beautiful website, great flow of pages, amazing content management systems, and enough content to knock your boots off lose because only one-two judges looked at it and graded things harder.

There needs to be a rehaul of the system in which standards are set and all judges are judging on a level playing field while being well informed.

It's not fair to the teams that spend months building a website to be judged by a person without website experience not being able to recognize how difficult things are. While some things that look difficult but are deceptively easy will not fly with a well informed person.

But that's just my two cents.

[Chris is me]

I agree with your concerns (likzuz), but I also thought all of a regional's websites were judged by the same people. I think that would solve most of those concerns if this wasn't the case.

I also disagree with redesigning your site every year. I notice a lot of the comments on Shaker's website were of the variety "you used iWeb so your site is terrible", and it seemed either judges LOVED the website or abhorred it. Still enough to get a shiny trophy though.