There’s a speech about this I give every year…
Everyone keeps neglecting a MAJOR part of FIRST websites.
THEY TELL YOU WHAT JUDGES WANT TO SEE.
The criteria/grading sheet that’s included in the Website Award pdf is the SAME sheet that the judges use to evaluate your websites.
As a 5-year website judge, I encourage EVERY FIRST kid to do this, it makes a big difference if you just READ.
If you look at the Website Award section of the manual, they give you the grading process for the judges from last year. The outline of the award basically explains what FIRST is looking for.
The following criteria will be used to evaluate the Website Awards:
General
The ideal website is a genuine reflection of the team, its participants, spirit, and goals. It should not be just a bulletin board with information accessible via a menu. It should tell an individual story and also detail how it is part of the larger FIRST community.
Content and Design
The content (text, pictures, music, etc,) and design of a website should work together to provide a pleasing user experience. Good content with a confusing interface, or vice versa, will not be scored as highly as a site with better balance.
They want to see content, that’s the key of any team website. They want the inside, human perspective of a team, and to see how this team interacts within both the FIRST community and their own local community. They want multimedia, pictures, video, flash animation is a nice bonus. They want up-to-date information, what the team is currently working on and how it’s going.
To be honest, most evaluators don’t care about the ease of your maintenance - though I don’t know why you’d want to create something that was hard to update. Since Web 2.0 came around, dynamic interactivity is MUCH more accessible.
Yes, visual appeal, media, structure, and browser compatibility are HUGE, but only if you give me content to read inside all that. W3C is nice too, but there will be website judges out there that will have NO idea why that’s important, or even, what it is. If you code to standards, that’s great, but don’t do it because that’s what judges want to see - do it because it’s good practice.
Personally, I’d rather be able to navigate to a subpage in 2 clicks (or less). General rule of thumb is provide THREE types of navigation. You can do this in an interesting way. For a site I’m working on now, our UI is a car dashboard. Our 3 types of navigation are a speedometer (with words /icons instead of numbers), a mock GPS, and a rear view mirror. From there, each subpage has 3 links. At most, it takes 2 clicks: 1 to switch sections, 2 to switch to a subpage. I think that’s the most successful solution, but again, that’s my personal opinion. If you WANT to do 3 clicks, I suggest providing a Site Map.
Here’s what I explained to my kids when they were looking for examples of websites:
To be honest, the web criteria is more about the content of the site than the presentation of it. Looking professional and good is going to help your score, but over 50 points goes into how your site works, and what story it tells.
Here is 75’s website.
They won the Website Award at the NJ Regional in 2009. http://www.roboraiders.org/
103’s website approaches the award from a different level of interactivity.
http://www.cybersonics.org
Chiefdelphi has won the Website Excellence award EVERY year since 2004: http://team.chiefdelphi.com/
Some other good sites:
522: http://www.robowizards.com/
1980: http://team1980.org
This is the kind of stuff judges look for:
team success stories
appreciation and recognition of sponsors/mentors/volunteers
resources for other teams
photos of members/mentors/coaches
FIRST is also big on is letting people know about the impact its had on teams.
One of my favorite things to see is an alumni page. Unless you’re a rookie team, you’ve had kids graduate from your group. So, what have they gone on to do/study? Are they working in science, engineering, or technology fields? It makes SUCH an impact to people in FIRST if they realize just how much progress your team is making in inspiration.
Team 1089 (my team) won the website award at the NJ Regional in 2006 and 2008. If you would like, please feel free to stop by our website and compare/contrast with ours (http://www.mercury1089.com ).
I worked with the students this year to develop a more cohesive identity, increase site interactivity, and try and create new homegrown resources. If you would like to talk to me more about what I personally think is important in a FIRST award-winning website, feel free to PM me.
I know this post is long, I’m sorry.
But I hope it was informative.
2005-2009 NYC Website Evaluator | 2006-2009 Philadelphia Website Evaluator | 2008 & 2009 NJ Website Evaluator Advisor
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