In the past, FIRST had awarded website awards and stopped awarding them in the past four years. As of the 2017 season, there are no website awards being distributed, and I am of the opinion that they should still be awarded.
Teams with FIRST's website as their own: 946 (16.12%)
Teams with "Null" Websites: 1601 (27.28%)
Total Percentage of Teams w/o Websites: 43.40%
Even with the advent of free web hosting via tools like GitHub Pages, teams simply don’t seen to be able to get websites up to show off their team.
Please note that my calculations do not include teams that use social media websites as their team website (eg. Facebook or Twitter.)
I feel like having a small website award, sponsored by GitHub, Microsoft, Amazon, or Google would make in incredible amount of sense. I feel this is especially the case if the sponsor would be willing and able to give an auxiliary reward of some hosting to make things easier on less experienced or less technical teams, and / or offer Email hosting (esp. in the case of Google Apps for Business). I know personally that a little help can go a long way, especially with rookie / “thin” teams with limited resources.
Not everyone presents for Chairman’s Award, and that gives a spot at Champs!
IMHO, if you need a reward to do something, you’re doing it for the wrong reason. I like our team having a site, but it’s mainly for the dissemination of information about the team, posting photos, etc. If there was an award, I doubt we’d do much different.
Last year FIRST had a Media Award, that included the website (which is one of many channels). They are not offering that award this year. It is a nice acknowledgement of the efforts of media teams, which often don’t get the same recognition as other technical team members.
I do hope something happens, and offering benefits like that could really encourage more teams to work on their websites. One of the most frustrating things in FRC is finding teams’ websites, or social media pages, or just a way to contact them.
I think if FIRST is going to promote that it is about “more than robots” then it needs to have awards covering more areas outside of robots. We have Entrepreneurship & Imagery, but I think “media” is a big gap that needs to be filled. I think many teams want to and are showing off their progress on social media and their website anyways. It comes back to making FIRST loud!