Am I the only one who is deeply intrigued by the necessity to add an “Event Subtype” category to the regional list? It strikes me that this could be a sign of an expansion of the district system.
Most website designers carefully consider backward-compatibility to support people who collect data of your site to increase web traffic. I hope FIRST web design can at least put up a link to the old interface.
I feel like I’m clicking way too much to find information. I like how the FTC, FLL and FRC are all easily searchable now but I don’t feel like searching for an FTC team and FRC team on one page.
It seems to me FIRST web design needs to look at TBA or Google’s one box search solution.
Put your team #, regional or other info in one search box. Google Adsense has everything built in for searching and FIRST could
make money of the advertisements (and help reduce team registration fees! ) .
NO MAPS ?
There is no Google Map on the new interface ? (or maybe I can’t find it)
Wonder if they are going to change the pages that show match scores, awards, etc during the competitions?
Us screen scrapers would like to know, otherwise it will be a scramble on week 1. Now, if they were to make them all consistent in construction, that would be a blessing
It looks like FIRST just switched from direct team numbers to an internal database ID to find teams and the like. As far as I can tell, the -section:myarea parameter has no effect on the webpage, with the tpid= parameter being the actual team number.
As long as we could literally do a scrape of the website, and log down which internal ID numbers correspond to which team (for example FIRST’s tpid 20863 is Team 228), then frclinks.com and TBA could just use a giant lookup table to redirect requests.
The only plus side is that the aesthetically data on FIRST’s website is now better formatted.
I’m sure they (the web folks at FIRST) are continuing to work on the website. Before we become too critical in our analytical ways - let’s remember that this is their time to work and to make improvements. If anyone does have valid suggestions and concerns, I would suggest that you contact FIRST directly - otherwise, it is just nattering.
According to Bill’s blog the FIRST website is about to get a facelift. Changes will go live the week of August 24th. Check out our new navigation and upgraded mentor resources (plus new video and more pictures).