FIRST just posted the regional web winners and mentioned that there were also 75 teams that won the **2004 Web Excellence Award ** .
My questions are:
Which teams won the award?
What factors do you think earned the recognition for your team?
What is your link so that others can learn from your design?
We’ll start the process:
**Team 341 ** won in Philly.
We kept the design simple, tuned in to the FIRST Message, and close to the Award specs. We also made sure that the site conveyed the enthusiasm that we feel for FIRST.
Is team 691’s website down or did FIRST give us the wrong link?? I clicked on it thinking I was going to see a great website. It redirected me to something else.
We won the Website Excellence award for [Insert Regional Here]. Is this a gesture of kindness from FIRST, or something? I’ll stop speaking right now :).
I think one factor that involves our win is that we update our page frequently.
I have browsed a good many websites over the years and a good many of them are never updated.
I think you mean Team 47, in that case, although 48’s website http://www.delphielite.com, also won a Website Excellence Award at the Pittsburgh and Canadian Regionals. I must, however, get out my trusty Whip of Mentorship and use it on the student webmaster to induce the addition of greater content and more frequent updates…muahahahahaaa…
I’m confused. So, you didn’t have to submit your website or anything to receive this website excellence award? Because we got an email saying we were awarded it with the little logo and everything but we thought it was sent to us by mistake.
ALL websites in the FIRST database (ie if you looked at the regional attendees lists at usfirst.org and the team name was linked to a team site) were judged for the website awards. Any site that score 80% or higher on scoring is awarded the Website Excellence Award. I assume the winner gets it too
Team 639 got it for the Canadian Regional. Visit us at www.team639.org
The site was completely redesigned this year so it is not back to the level as it once was in terms of user features for team members. Well, I guess you can’t use that stuff anyway.
That image of our website on FIRST’s page kinda sucks. I think it was taken with an early version of Opera 7, which has a known positioning bug seen in the title and on the bottom. For the record, the site works in the major three browsers (and other up-to-standard ones such as Safari), but I think there are a quite a few more content-based reasons Woburn Robotics Online did so well; here’s a short article I wrote when I first made it, about the design involved. And here’s what Woodie had to say about the award. You can see he mainly speaks of resources and the Ask188 feature.
And the winners get these buttons (not quite the same as the excellence ones):
I think there’s a lot of confusion here. Let me copy and paste the following information from the Awards section of the 2004 Competition Manual. It should clear a lot of things up for all of you:
[left]8.8 WEBSITE DESIGN AWARDS
**The Website Design Award recognizes excellence in student-designed, built, and managed FIRST team ****websites. Eligible websites are judged/scored *****PRIOR *****to the competition by a panel of judges. Two **subcategories of awards will be given for website design:
[/left]
1) “Website Excellence”
2) “Best Website.”
**Every submission that meets the FIRST website design standards of excellence will receive the Website ****Excellence award. Website Excellence award winners will receive an electronic certificate to include on their ****websites, and will be featured prominently on the FIRST website. At each Regional Competition, there will ****be one award for Best Website. The overall championship Best Website award winners will be chosen from **among the regional winners.
[left]8.8.1 Submission and Deadline Information
**Only team websites that are entered into the FIRST team management information system via the FIRST ****website by noon (12:00 p.m.) on February 20, 2004 will be judged. Team websites are eligible for these ****awards at every regional event in which the team is competing. Only one electronic Website Excellence ****certificate will be awarded per team for the entire competition season. A team is eligible to win the Best **Website award at multiple regional events.
[/left]
Aside from the fact that they posted the Regional Best Website winners on the FIRST website instead of all the 75 Website Excellence winners (which makes perfect sense), I believe everything stated in the rules above is correct. As long as your website was registered with FIRST’s TIMS system by the deadline, your team was automatically entered into consideration for both awards.
Fixed-size: This was done for a number of reasons such as to-the-pixel element positioning, and content delivery to different media and resolutions. You’ll notice that this website works in screen resolutions as low as 800 x 600 pixels. Those with anything above 1600 x 1200 (which is four times larger than 800 x 600) pixel resolution may have difficulty reading the text, but that is easily remedied by altering the text size in-browser.
I love your website. Its very nice looking and one of my favorites. I like the alternate style sheets. Too bad IE doesn’t support the ability to change them through the menu’s like Mozilla. Though I really wonder why most people go for absolute positioning and not relative.
