Website Review & Recommendations
Forgotten Coast Robotics Alliance
A blueprint for the new fc-robotics.org home page
1. What the home page needs to do
Your site already has something most young teams never build: a deep, genuinely useful library of interior pages — learning paths in Java, CAD, and 3D printing; guidance on youth protection, scholarships, costs, and time commitment; an honest “Not a Drop-Off Program” explainer; and the genuinely clever Left Brain / Right Brain organizational model. The content is there. What’s missing is a front door.
A home page has about ten seconds to do three things for a stranger who lands on it: tell them who you are, prove you’re real and active, and point them to the one thing they should do next. It is not a place to explain how the team runs internally — that is what the interior pages are for. The home page is a lobby, not an office.
It also serves four different visitors at once, and the design has to hold all four without overwhelming any of them:
- Prospective students — middle and high schoolers deciding whether robotics is for them.
- Parents — weighing cost, time, safety, and supervision before they let their kid commit.
- Mentors and volunteers — adults with technical or business skills who could coach.
- Sponsors and donors — local businesses and families who could fund the team.
2. Three principles to design around
Face outward, not inward
Write every line for a visitor who has never heard of you. Internal operations content — role charts, sub-team structure — belongs on an interior page, linked from the home page but not occupying it.
Show, don’t tell
Nothing builds trust like real photographs of your actual students, your actual robot, and your actual competitions. Stock photos and clip art quietly signal “not real yet.” Even a handful of phone snapshots from a build session beats the best stock image.
One clear next step per visitor
Every section should make it obvious what to do next. A confused visitor leaves; a guided one clicks. Give each of the four audiences a single, obvious door.
3. The new home page, section by section
This is a top-to-bottom blueprint. Each block below is one horizontal band of the page, in order.
The current menu spans eight dropdowns and roughly thirty-five pages — too much to navigate and too much to maintain. Collapse it to about five plain-language items, for example: About · Join the Team · How We Work · Support Us · Blog. Keep all the existing deep pages — just nest them under these clearer headings.
Also include
- The team logo, top-left, linking home.
- One persistent, high-contrast button — “Get Involved” or “Join” — top-right, visible on every page.
Note
Rename the current “Help!” menu — sponsorship and mentor recruiting are hiding behind a label nobody would think to click. “Support Us” or “Get Involved” is far clearer.
The first full screen. A large, real photo of the team or robot behind or beside a short, confident statement of who you are.
Headline
Your name plus a one-line identity, e.g. “Forgotten Coast Robotics Alliance — a student-led FIRST Tech Challenge team on Florida’s Forgotten Coast.”
Supporting line
One sentence on what you do and who it’s for: students designing, building, and competing with real robots — and learning engineering, business, and teamwork along the way.
Two buttons
- Primary: “Join the Team” (your biggest goal — recruiting).
- Secondary: “Support Us” or “Meet the Team”.
Two or three sentences, in your own student voice, on why the team exists: the FIRST mission of building confident, capable young people through real engineering, and what makes your corner of the Forgotten Coast worth being part of. Warm and proud, not corporate.
A short horizontal row of three to five facts that tell a stranger you’re legitimate and serious. Concrete numbers do more work than adjectives.
Use what you can confirm
- FIRST Tech Challenge team · member of the AeroCoast League
- Founded [year] · [number] of student members
- Registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit
- Awards won / events competed in — as soon as you have them
The heart of the page: four side-by-side cards, one per audience, each leading into the strong interior content you already have.
The four cards
- Students → “How to Get Started,” “Open to Everyone,” team roles.
- Parents → “Not a Drop-Off Program,” “Costs and Time Commitment,” “FIRST Youth Protection.”
- Mentors → “Tech and Non-Tech Mentors Needed.”
- Sponsors → “Finances, 501(c)(3), and Fundraising,” plus a clear donate path.
This single section turns your buried menu into four obvious, welcoming paths.
Your Left Brain / Right Brain model — technical sub-team and business/outreach sub-team, equal and interdependent — is genuinely distinctive and a real recruiting asset. It shows there’s a place on the team whether a student loves code or loves storytelling.
Give it a short, visual teaser here — a two-column graphic and a sentence or two — then link to the full page. (That existing page becomes a proper interior “How We’re Organized” page rather than the front page.)
Pull the two or three latest posts from your existing Blog automatically, each with a photo, headline, and date. A visitor seeing recent activity knows the team is alive and moving. A stale page is the fastest way to lose a sponsor or a parent.
A row of sponsor logos with a genuine thank-you, plus a short line and button inviting new sponsors. This does double duty: it honors the people backing you and shows prospective sponsors they’d be in good company. If you have no sponsors yet, replace it with a simple, direct “Be our first sponsor” panel.
One last full-width band with a single, strong invitation before the footer — most likely “Ready to join? Here’s how to start” with one button. Don’t dilute it with competing links.
The current site has no contact information anywhere, and its only social reference points to a blank placeholder. For a youth organization recruiting members and asking for money, that is the single most important gap to close.
The footer must include
- A real contact email (a team address, not a personal one).
- Meeting location(s) and general schedule.
- Real, working links to your social accounts — or none at all until they exist.
- 501(c)(3) status line for donors, and the copyright line.
4. Wireframe
The same ten sections, stacked the way a visitor would scroll through them.
5. What you’ll need to gather first
Most of the redesign is blocked not by design but by missing raw material. Collecting these is the real first step:
- Real photographs — team at work, the robot, competition day, mentors with students. Aim for 8–10 usable shots.
- A team contact email that forwards to whoever currently handles inquiries.
- Social media accounts — set up the ones you’ll actually maintain, and link only those. Remove the placeholder x.com link.
- A short list of facts — founding year, current member count, league, any awards or events so far.
- A one-paragraph mission statement in the team’s own voice.
- Meeting location(s) and schedule in a form you’re comfortable publishing.
- Sponsor names and logo files, if you have any sponsors yet.
6. Writing & tone
The interior writing has a likable, earnest, student voice — keep that. A few habits will sharpen it for a public audience:
- Speak to the visitor. Write “you” — “you’ll learn,” “you can join” — not just “we” and “our team.”
- Lead with the hook, then the detail. Open a section with why it matters to the reader; save the specifics for the interior page.
- Fix the small things. Run a spell check (the current site has “preformance”), remove duplicated paragraphs, and use real bullet lists instead of stacked one-line paragraphs.
- Be proud. You’ve built a real team with a real philosophy and a real curriculum. Say so plainly — confidence reads as credibility.
7. Priorities — where to start
Not everything has to ship at once. A rough order:
| Tier | Do these |
|---|---|
| Must-have before launch |
Hero with real identity and a real photo · contact info in the footer · one clear primary call to action · simplified navigation. |
| Soon after |
The four-door “Get Involved” section · the proof bar · the recent-news feed pulling from the blog. |
| Polish | Sponsor logo strip · a designed Left/Right Brain teaser graphic · a photo gallery · ongoing fresh blog posts. |
8. A note on the rest of the site
Worth saying plainly: your interior content is unusually strong for a young team — the learning paths, the youth-protection page, the honest “Not a Drop-Off Program” framing, the scholarship and cost pages. Much of the home page’s job is simply to surface and route to what you’ve already written. Two quick site-wide fixes beyond the home page itself: rename the “Help!” menu so people can find sponsorship and mentoring, and add an actual contact page under “About” — right now “About/Contact” has no way to contact anyone.
The one-sentence version
Build a real front door: a hero that says who you are with a real photo, four clear paths for students, parents, mentors, and sponsors, proof that you’re active, and — above all — a way to actually reach you.