Something is up and I cant post my question on Q&A…
I have a question about website requirements.
According to the rules your website has to be able to be viewed by the evaluators will be disqualified. There is a part of our school website that is password protected as it contains phone numbers and emails of our team members and mentors so we can get in contact with each other. Unless you have been approved you cannot see that portion of the site.
No, that will not make you disqualified. The judgment criteria for previous years did not include team member names or contact information. I haven’t looked at the grading rubric for this season, but I’d expect it’s similar. Make sure you recognize your sponsors and mentors though. That is important.
Honestly, just host it outside of the schools network. It doesn’t cost much at all and the team should be able to expense it. This way you and other team members can have a lot more control over over it and not worry about interfering with the schools network. That’s just my $0.02. That’s what we do for our team because adding it on to our school site would be a PITA.
Don’t build your website simply to win an award. Make sure it serves a purpose. Think about your target market: Students, Parents, Volunteers and Sponsors. Evidently, your website has a password-protected area - which is good because it serves a purpose. Build your website around those rather than to FIRST’s award specifications. Those will follow automatically. Otherwise, you might miss the real purpose of a website.
I think the FIRST Website Award criteria is great to follow as guidelines if you’re entering or not. There’s a lot of common web usability sense in there that every website should (but of course doesn’t) follow.
FIRST realizes that a lot of school boards do not allow posting of student names, individual contact info or photos. They’ll probably make an exception, you can send an email to http://usfirst.org/contactform.aspx to see if they would. Worst comes to worst see if you can get the legal guardians of students to sign a consent and a release form.
There’s the website rubric for this season. No where does it say that you need team members, or their information listed. It only suggests that you recognize your team sponsors, mentors, and volunteers.
Maybe I’m reading this differently than others. Are you concerned that having a password protected area of your website will cause a disqualification from the FIRST judges?
I know that 1511’s site has some “team only” areas and it has not seemed to cause any problems with the judging criteria. We won at the Chesapeake Regional last year, so it didn’t matter then.
