Our students have been hard at work creating a new team website, and would love to hear your feedback. Let us know what you think.
It’s impressive, that’s for certain. I visited on mobile, and it preformed perfectly without any of the usual screen butchery that some sites provide.
Overall, it looks very nice. I do have a few suggestions:
- See if you can split the About page into multiple sections, or at least pare down the Our Story section. Right now, there’s so much text there it doesn’t make me inclined to read any of it.
- Try to move your budget and operating information from the body of the Sponsors page. When I made the website for my team, we put all of that in its own PDF, which we linked to on our Sponsors page. That became the PDF we gave to potential sponsors, and it didn’t fill the page for people who want to see who sponsors your team.
- Do you have multiple levels of sponsors? (i.e. different donation levels) If so, you might consider scaling the sponsors’ logos based on their donation level. Then you don’t end up with a few huge logos taking up the whole page.
- It would be nice to have a link to firstinspires.org in either (or both) the Our Story and What Is FIRST sections. That way if a potential sponsor who has never heard of FIRST comes to your website they can get some background information about the competition from the primary source.
- Since you have your gallery so neatly organized by competition, you might consider putting a link to each gallery from the competition details on the season page and vice versa.
- Right now when you click on one photo album, at the bottom is suggests other albums from the other year. I feel like it would make more sense to have it recommend albums from the same year so you can see how the robot changed throughout the season.
- You have all of the social media information on the Contact Us page, but it might be nice to have links to them also on the home page. You might even consider embedding a social media ticker that would compile all of your social media activity and display it in one feed. We had limited success with Tint, but you can probably find something better if you actually look around.
*]As far as I can see you can only get to the Team Updates page from the homepage. It would be nice to have that included in the navigation bar at the top.
Looks pretty clean and professional so far! Overall your website is very comprehensive. 
Just a few suggestions:
Try to breakdown some of the paragraph descriptions particularly in your About, Outreach, and Sponsor page. Its best to have concise phrases paired with more graphics that allows first time visitors to take in a lot of visual information without being overwhelmed with text.
Particularly for the Sponsors page, try to create some attractive graphics that draw attention to particularly how someone can sponsor your team. Like Ari, I’d definitely recommend adding information about or creating sponsor levels for your team. This creates incentives for certain sponsors to donate more money for a variety of results.
You can also add your social media feed to the front page as well, especially if your team has a twitter. The front page is a little sparse right now, but adding only one or two things should suffice since you want to avoid clutter as well.
Hope this helps!
I would try to word your split from Berkeley High in the about section a bit more diplomatically. I understand the bitterness that the team may feel over their treatment by the school, but it comes across as petty - especially the paragraph below.
We were able to accomplish all of this despite a lot of friction with our school, Berkeley High School. After years of ignoring us, our school district finally agreed to support us this year. They did so by providing us with an outdoor courtyard to work in. Due to this unfavorable location, our expensive CNC mill, tools, and our 2016 robot were exposed to the elements and suffered terrible water damage. Furthermore, the school hired mentors who did not agree with our team culture. They did not allow student involvement in the design process, thereby denying students the opportunity to learn and further their skills. In addition, they denied the Team’s chosen Team Captain and Business Lead access to the team’s financial documents, making it impossible for the Business team to practice with real-world skills, such as balancing the Team’s budget. Due to their failure to adhere to FIRST’s values and our team’s mission (cf. below), we eventually broke all ties with Berkeley High School. This is how Team 5499 became a community team.
Always try to take the high road - no matter how difficult it may be. It will make your team look better for it. Otherwise, your site looks great.
Agreed.
I agree as well, and have passed this on to the students.
+1 For sure. Outside of that, everything else looks super professional! I also happened to read your team history, and I would like to personally congragulate team 5499 on their amazing resilience in the 2017 season. You guys have really become an example of some of the struggles teams of our nature face, and putting FIRST morals before your own high school was definitely a brave move. I hope 5499 goes into the 2018 season with great success!
I’m glad to see that the entire section has been fixed and looks cleaner as a result. This is a perfect example of gracious professionalism for your team. Disagreements and the resulting anger/bitterness between different organizations happen everywhere all the time, but it’s usually best to keep those feelings within the group and not let it spill out to the public.
In fall 2016, the Team made the decision to stop participating in PiE’s Robotics Competition and instead focus our resources entirely on FRC. In addition, the Team began to receive support from BHS; before this, Team 5499 operated largely as a community team. However, the Team found that its culture and goals did not align with those of the school and thus decided to return to its original ways as a community team.
Much better - some acknowledgment that there were issues with the school, but no sign of lingering bad feelings about it. I wish your team the best of luck in the future. 