You are winner 16,547,371

21 June 2004

8 comments

A Blue Perspective: You are winner 16,547,371

When you win an award it means you're only guaranteed to be as good as your competition. If you win an award for "most improved body odour", you better have a look at the people around you before patting yourself on the back.

I'd like to think that while judging at the Web Standards Awards, we maintain a fairly high standard of aesthetic and technical achievement, and that this standard has only increased over the few months since we have started – mainly due to an increase in the usage and understanding of Standards themselves.

In addition to our own browsing, we have an open submission form that allows anyone to nominate any site – theirs or someone elses – and it's through here that we fossick a few rare gems. However, there is also much dross: sites with ten-deep nested tables, sites with flashing blue text on a black background, sites done entirely in Flash – bad Flash — and any site whose URL begins "www.geocities.com".

Through visiting so many sites that I wouldn't normally come across, I became aware of an organisation called the "Golden Web Awards". Curious to see what sort of people would award a site with a 500px x 500px tiled background of a blurry pet cat, I decided to visit their site (www.goldenwebawards.com).

"Top 10 Award winners" ... OK ... hmmmm ... "Best-RX-Online.com" is number 1. Oh, but "nike.com" is number 3, followed by "breedmaster.com" (not as dirty as it sounds). "More winners" – that sounds promising ... OK ... Monkey Kitty, Matt's Little Blue Trailer, Ryan dot com, Project Miso, Crystal Driveways.

I'm not trying to be elitist here, but what awards body on the face of this planet would find that those are sites whose "web design, originality and content have achieved levels of excellence deserving of recognition". There are actually some good sites on there who have, I presume, requested that they be considered for a Golden Web Award, but I have to ask: why would you seek the recognition of an awards body who seemingly hand out an award to whoever asks for one?

I'm not sure what I think is worse – the organisers convincing someone that winning this award is an achievement, or that they purport to be "The International Association of Web Masters and Designers".

... or that they rejected my site for an award:oP

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Comments

  1. 1/8

    Hans commented on 22 June 2004 @ 03:28

    Yuck. I agree. I'd have to say that Nike and Breedmaster are the only "decent" sites on that "Top 10" list.

    I'd call it a scam and forget about it.

    Now that I think about it, it seems like they're picking the worst (no offense) sites, not the "best."

  2. 2/8

    AkaXakA commented on 22 June 2004 @ 05:23

    Yup, you're right...only project gizmo's one actually looks special, but all the code (html and js) is completely bloated..

    I really wonder who makes up these lists.

  3. 3/8

    huphtur commented on 22 June 2004 @ 05:50

    I always thought of awards to be kind of silly. Scrivs confirmed that with this post:
    http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/whitespace/first_ever_whitespace_awards.php

    But I have to admit that, being an inhouse webnerd, receiving a WSA for one of the sites I worked on, gave me some more leverage and respect from my superiors.

    Thank you Cameron and WSA.

  4. 4/8

    Rob Mientjes commented on 23 June 2004 @ 04:53

    Wow! Then I'd rather not win an award! This stuff is scary! :P
    My sites aren't the best designs, but they are validating as XHTML 1.0 Strict :P
    That's even better than all I've seen on that sites.

  5. 5/8

    Michael Pierce commented on 23 June 2004 @ 08:25

    I wouldn't worry too much...most "recent" award was September 2003.

  6. 6/8

    Michael Pierce commented on 23 June 2004 @ 08:25

    I wouldn't worry too much...most "recent" award was September 2003.

  7. 7/8

    The Man in Blue commented on 23 June 2004 @ 09:08

    No no no, that's just their last round of awards -- their homepage says they're accepting 2004/2005 entries!

  8. 8/8

    Tomislav Bilic commented on 2 September 2004 @ 22:59

    I have visited Web Standards Awards for the first time and I really like the awarded webpages. Every one deserved the award :)

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