Take a look at our website, and let us know if there is anything we can work on to improve our chances of winning the website award.
Took a quick glance and I’m happy to say it looks easily maneuverable and clean. I would rearrange the your 662 Rockey Mountain Robotics logo so it doesn’t the “About FIRST” button. Best of luck 
We have made quite some progress on our site. Any feedback would be welcome.
Three questions:
- Is it OK to submit a url that goes to a website description page (i.e. explaining what went into the site, etc…)
- How important is validation. It won’t be possible to fix ~23 errors due to the framework used (Drupal).
- How do judges check custom code? We do use drupal, but we did quite a bit on the back end php structure, as well as css and html.
Could someone verify if the videos work in IE? I checked and it does not work, I want to see if its something I need to fix. They are HTML5.
Oh, why do gradients look so professional?
When I look at your site I see some big grey boxes with X’s in them instead of pictures or video. You might fix that.
Thank you!
Could you tell me what browser you are using? I’m thinking I need to move away from the HTML5 video player…
Looks very professional! I noticed some horizontal scrolling needed on the Rebound Rumble page, only for the tables. The text seems to be liquid however the tables aren’t. Although it’s not necessary and perhaps your team likes it, but the liquidity of any page, from my perceptive, is useless. Maybe add a couple pictures here and there, but it looks great! Nice job! It’s very impressive! Hope this help!
Thank you, I fixed that. We like to keep it fluid for sake of compatibility, for pictures its a matter of doing width=100% rather than a px value. The rest is automatic by drupal.
We will add more pictures!
- Submit your main URL - http://www.rockymountainrobotics.com/
- It’s on the rubric, but it’s not terribly important. Validation is nice, but it doesn’t actually mean a site will be cross browser compatible. More often than not, you have to break validation in order to get something to work on some browser.
- If you’d like to highlight your custom code, you can have an “About this Website” section, and detail what you’ve done. Some judges will have web dev experience, others won’t.
Some feedback:
- Blogs have “You are not allowed to post a new blog entry.” at the top
- The Public Relations blog is empty
- Remove the read more links, by setting Drupal to show the full blog posts. Most are short, and the “Read more” link implies that there is more when there isn’t.
- The Departments block disappears on the QA and Website blogs.
- Throw a FIRST logo + link in the footer
- In the footer, move the resources to the right. They are almost all off site links, so you should group them together with the other offsite set (Sponsors).
Your site has a LOT of activity and it’s shaping up nicely.
Hey,
Thank you for the comprehensive look through! I came across your presentation you posted (https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B0AuJPzYwRdkODk0ZjM0NTItYzgxYi00NzYxLTlmYWEtYzNkNTA3ZmRiOWJl).
Wish I came across it earlier, but it looks like I hit most of the points by chance
I made a lot of the changes you suggested, my team is working on sprucing it up. Looking at your presentation, I think I will put yoxview back in (like lightbox). Three questions:
- Do you guys grade across browser compatibility? I am having serious issues getting Flash videos to work, and HTML5 seems to fail on IE. I may be able to pull it off before thursday.
- Would you consider the content on this site geared toward everyone, or just our team? I personally see it as widespread, but I could see the argument for the latter.
- Are websites graded at the deadline (16th) or at regionals?
Again, Thank you!
http://browsershots.org/ use that site to test your cross browser. (it takes a few hours and u ahve to extrent your thing every 30minutes) but its worth it. It showed me what was worng with each browser and I got everything fixed (138 browsers are able to use on my site now because of it) also this gave me 9errors on each page but it shuld be fine seeing that you can see the page on 138 browsers and every touch phone device there is lol. and to answer your recent questions…
-
Do you guys grade across browser compatibility? I am having serious issues getting Flash videos to work, and HTML5 seems to fail on IE. I may be able to pull it off before thursday. (Dont worrie about flash cause you wont get it done in time. you have to know flash before coding it into a website (my suggestion is to go a read the tutorials after you submit it so that you can make it better)
-
Would you consider the content on this site geared toward everyone, or just our team? I personally see it as widespread, but I could see the argument for the latter.
Geared more towards everyone in a since -
Are websites graded at the deadline (16th) or at regionals? the 16th eastern time. is say have it submitted on the 15th to be safe
also a few more suggestions:
Have a static FIRST Logo on your home page. The one in the flipimage thing is cool but I dont really think that is what the rules state (I read them like 15times it strictly wants a irst logo on your home page with a link) What I did was just put it as a static image and link to the first website. makes it easyer.
also on the home page you dont want to have people really scroll down to much you want it to be short and to the point.
Navigation on your site is a little confusing. you may lose points for that (expecially at first glance its really confusing… you ahve a resource bar/tab on the left but all your menu bar stuff is at the top. whats the resources doing on the left?
also I like how you set up your page except it gets to jumbled on some pages and why do you have 9+ pages at the bottom of the home page? thats confusing…
sorry for spelling…really tired tonight lol
Hope this helped good luck to you and your team
Yes, but pixel perfection isn’t terribly important. Content should be accessible on anything. As for HTML5 video… that’s still a hot mess these days. Chrome 16 doesn’t have full screen playback available, and you’re right about IE9 failing. (And Firefox 10) It might be that you’re using the .MOV container. .MP4 is more compatible I believe, and works with Flash players as well.
Check out this article: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/simple-html5-video-flash-fallback-custom-controls/
If you want to be totally sure, switch to Flash for desktops. HTML5 video playback is really only good on mobile devices right now.
It’s for everyone. You can (and should) have team oriented content, but it should not be the predominant focus. Your home page should be welcoming and understandable to someone completely new to FIRST, and it shouldn’t alienate them.
Grading can start at the deadline. Grades must be in the Monday before a regional starts. Your site could be graded at any point between then. It’s graded live, there’s no snapshot or whatever. You can (and should) continue working on your site and posting updates.
One of the biggest faults a team can make is doing something like going to a week 1 regional, and posting nothing on their site about how they did by the time they go to their second week 4 or 5 regional.
Firefox 3.6.25