The Blue Alliance site redesign for 2009 is coming along nicely, and at this point we need to think about how we want The Blue Alliance to look. The site design we’ve used for the last two years has worked fairly well, but it was basically a WordPress theme that we just slapped some HTML into the middle of. We managed to fit everything, but it was never carefully planned out. White on grey isn’t the easiest to read color scheme, and things were a bit smooshed.
With the 2009 site, we want to be more deliberate in the page design, so you’re probably going to see an all-new The Blue Alliance design. However, we really want to solicit community feedback - you’re the ones who viewed 1,000,000 pages on the site in 2008, so you probably have the best ideas of what would make the information you’re after easier to find and make the site more useful overall.
What are your favorite parts of The Blue Alliance? What do you wish we had that we don’t? How do you usually use the site, and what do you think would make it better?
If anyone has web design experience, let us know and maybe you can help us with the new design. We’re hoping to build something great for the tens of thousands of unique visitors we get each competition season, and we want to work with the community to build something with your input and collaboration.
I use mainly the event pages. Other than more videos (which is kind of beyond the control of TBA), having the awards would be helpful. e.g, on an event page, list the awards, and then list team awards on the team’s page.
Oh, and there was something last year that unplayed matches/matches without scores were ties. Might be a good idea to fix that.
I actually like the theme, just wished we had more videos. But I would like to say thank you to all the members for putting such a wonderful site together. I know the videos are not in the control of THE BLUE ALLIANCE. Thank you guys for putting the work in.
Video and Match archives are AWESOME on TBA - BUT for those of us who CAN record a regional - we can’t always parse out the video. In 2007 I did this for the Sac-Davis Regional and it took at least 10 hours of time spread over about 4-5 days. (making sure to record the intros, the match, and the final score). In 2008, my computer with the dv system just didn’t work and even if it did, parsing that video is too time intensive. SO… if we can’t parse the video, can it be uploaded to TBA and made available still to teams? Perhaps someone else will have time to parse or if need be grab the monstrous file -cut what they need out of it to make their highlight reel.
Allow each team to post/upload a video team profile up to 5 minutes max. I know we could do this via youtube - but since youtube is blocked by most school districts - TBA would be great place to get this. My team WANTS to know about the other teams, their robots, AND who they are in general. To encourage teams to upload these profiles, have one team at each competition be the promoter and encourage others to follow - set the example, etc… This could also tie into FIRST Judging and the yearbook page. Maybe this resource could serve as the yearbook page, or compliment it, so that judges too can get to know the teams. If you are not familiar with how this works, currently judges are prepped a couple days ahead of time of the teams that will be at a competition. They have a binder that gives a quick synopsis of all the teams (the yearbook page). From that judges get familiar with each team before walking into the pits Friday morning. A video profile would be a great compliment to that and maybe more benificial to judges in that they can place names and faces and robots with team numbers.
sorry for the long post… But those are my two wishes for TBA.
Here’s a few features i think would be useful (some mentioned before in previous discussions)
Something similar to that of SOAP Gameday would be cool. Except maybe if there was a way to extract the raw feed of each web cast and put them each into the same player (maybe even color coded, etc).
Team/Match notifications (via text message, e-mail, IM, etc.). Notifications can be setup and customized to be sent X minutes/days before event Y, as well as what is being notified (team matches, competitions, kickoff, etc)
Since TBA is much easier to navigate than the FIRST
site itself, it would be nice if you could mirror some of the information they have available. (Whether or not a team wants/is willing to mentor, Award information, etc.)
Something small that I was looking for the other day would be a nice feature. The team cap for a specific regional along with the number of teams in the regional (which is on the website now).
Arrangements have been made in the past to post large chunks of videos to SOAP and/or TBA and it has been parsed by others who had the time. I know I parsed and/or converted video for a number of regionals in 2008.
I agree with the call for awards videos or at the very least awards listings on both event pages and team pages. Team name and/or location searches would also be helpful.
I think an upgrade of the Flash streaming to h.264 would be a good idea. I believe it was discussed in another thread here with Art.
Also, I would move the “Navigation” on the right side over to the left.
I’m assuming you’re tracking stats, so I think it would be cool to have a most popular videos page.
That’s all I can think of now. I’m also a web programmer/designer (whatever that really means), so I can probably help with something, but I assume Chris Jelly will preview it to me anyways because he tends to do that with a lot of designs he does.
I’ve always been more of a fan of having all navigation links or “secondary content” either in a right hand column (instead of on the left), or in a horizontal menu on the top of the page with drop down menus.
The reason?
People naturally read left to right [in the Western world*]. So whatever is on the left side of the screen is always [subconsciously] read first. Now when people go to a specific page on a website, they generally want to read the primary content on the web page first, not the navigation links. Therefore, by moving the navigation links off to the right, it removes them from their natural reading pattern unless they explicitly want to find the navigation links or secondary content.
This can result in a small effect (noticeable over some time) for increasing the speed at which a user can gain information from a website.
Edit: for some examples of this, just look at Digg, YouTube, the new Facebook, Woot, most blogs, most news websites, etc. Unless a website uses three columns, you’ll rarely see navigation links in the left column nowadays.
Arabic goes from right to left, and most languages of the Far East go from top to bottom.
I do prefer to have the navigation horizontal near the top of the page leaving everything below that for main content. (Just look at how I did bobcatrobotics.org) Building drop downs can be tricky though. You need to make sure it works cross browser and that it doesn’t flicker. Sites like cnet.com and nytimes.com combine top navigation tabs and left hand side navigation. It seems to work in that case at least.
I basically never got around to it because I got bogged down with classwork once the semester started. There was an effort to port TBA to be CakePHP based, but that got stuck about halfway through. I am going to clean up the existing code base, implement a little bit of functionality to make URLs more human friendly, and then open source TBA. I hope to have this completed in the next two or three weeks. From there, I welcome anyone who wants to contribute a redesign or improved functionality to help us out
Edit:
of note, the functionality I am adding will make URLs independent of internal database IDs for events and matches. This way, if multiple installations of TBA ever get set up on different websites, URLs will be consistent across them, and it will be possible to guess the URL based on the year, event, and match.
