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Judging the 2006 WebAwards By: Bo Simmons
On occasion I saw some work that was not up to par, but the mere fact that I have new selections in my "Favorites" should tell you how impressed I was with some of the work. As part of the judging team, I looked at more than 25 sites and graded them on 6 main criteria, overall there are hundreds of judges looking at thousands of sites from across the globe. I was asked to consider things like usability and navigation not just react to a subjective notion of "good design." This broad judging criteria makes us proud of our own WebAwards, an Atlanta agency record of 5 in 2006 and 3 in 2005. I reviewed billion dollar corporate sites like Avaya and nationally know destinations like Comedy Central's Motherload, as well as sites I would never have seen, like an agency peer Proxicom.
Here are some links for a few of the WebAward sites I reviewed:
http://www.barbican.org.uk/
The Barbican is owned, funded and managed by the City of London, The third largest funder of the arts in the UK. Cool Blue has done 3 nationally recognized Theatre sites so this was one that I really enjoyed judging.
http://www.proxicom.com/
This Agency site has a choice of cool flash effects on each page – with a library of those effects in the left side link called balancing ecosystems.
http://www.merillat.com
Merillat is a cabinet maker, which sounded boring to me until I went to their site. I was really impressed with their flash tools that allow users to create accounts and remember choices that can be saved to a personalized Idea Folio. An outstanding user experience!
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/
Funny and irreverent for sure, this site does a good job of merchandising a wealth of content on the home page.