I am sure that most web teams are holding discussions as to what direction they need to refocus their web site to. We have been having discussions about the demographics that we are targeting.
My question is what demographics do you target? Do you focus on the team member’s or have you focused for a different group like sponsors, mentors or the general public?
Do you target at all or is this not part of any discussions that you have?
[font=Arial]Perhaps a simpler question is “Why do you have a web site?” Is it for internal (team use) or eternal (promotional) purposes?[/font]
[font=Arial]Perhaps a simpler question is “Why do you have a web site?” Is it for internal (team use) or eternal (promotional) purposes?[/font]
WE target ALL of the FIRST community and beyond. We have alot of features that we cram into our website and a very talented webmaster that allows us to do that. We have places for a smaller target audience and for the whole CD / FIRST community at large.
We have total agreement among our teams advisory staff, that the purpose of the website is to provide the FIRST community a place to talk and discuss just about anything. The website is for learning, having fun, sharing experiences and ideas, teaching, promoting FIRST.
We have great people that have showed an interest in helping us monitor the threads to make sure people don’t post meanful, hateful, misleading, or vulgar posts. We are very greatful to those folks as the website has grown rapidly over the past 9 years and we needed the help. That is the real power of this great FIRST community.
We do this to promote FIRST - this is part of our teams overall plan.
What’s a target…? 
Our website is intended to promote our team. However, it isn’t the greatest ever, so it really doesn’t do that well. 
We’re redoing our whole site at the moment. We have 4 college mentors now and soooo much free online storage space as a result :). Our new website (being built completely by students) will be geared for non-robotics people. Potential sponsors and people interested in robotics will hopefully find all of the general and easy-to-understand information they’re looking for about our team. We also plan to have a second site (built by everyone) for team use with content such as technical documentation, webboard, and anything else that relates to internal matters. After the past two years we think there’s just too much content if the two sites are combined for newcomers to figure out what exactly robotics is all about.