Judging the 2006 WebAwards By: Bo Simmons
Cool Blue has amassed over 30 different international awards in the
last 3 years, so when Bill Rice was looking for a judge for his
WebAward program, I offered my services to help. I was surprised to
find out what a high quality learning experience it was to be part of
his judging team.
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.icrossing.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!