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!