WebProNews » WebAwards

R/GA, Zugara Clean Up WebAwards

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 18:19:29 +0000

Those two agencies combined for 37 of the 96 awards handed out for web development work by the Web Marketing Association.

Web development at its finest came into focus with the WebAwards handed out to winners in 96 industries.

All of those winners matched up head to head yielded one best of show selection – TBS: Department of Humor Analysis, created by Brooklyn-based Big Spaceship:

TBS’s Dept. of Humor Analysis works hard to put the “very-” in front of “funny.” To help TBS steer clear of common pitfalls in this cut-throat, dog-eat-dog, rabbit-outwit-duck, duck-shoot-pig, anvil-smush-coyote, Chico-trip-Zeppo field of funny business, Big Spaceship joined forces (with) Mother Interactive to turn their very silly questionnaire into an addictive, fully interactive web site.

RGA picked up 19 of the WebAwards, just ahead of Zugara with 18.

The Web Marketing Association named R/GA their Top Agency for 2006:

The Top Agency Award recognizes the consistently outstanding development pursued by interactive firms when creating top website designs. R/GA has also won more WebAwards than any other organization during the past decade, although this is their first Top Agency Award. R/GA, headquartered in New York, won 12 Outstanding and 7 Standard of Excellence WebAwards.

Those 96 categories included a few our business-oriented readers may recognize.

Corporate Communications developed Spot Runner, which picked up an Outstanding award for Best Advertising Website.

In the Marketing category, the judges like Rare Method’s work on Silvertip Resort the best.

Ogilvy One received the nod for its work on IBM’s Help Desk II in the Information Services category.

Web development has become so much more of a skill and an art now than it was ten years ago, when function was viewed as vastly more important than form. It is good to see form can enhance function, and web developers can be recognized for doing so.

Development is not as easy as it looks. As noted in a recent post to the O’Reilly ONLamp blog, Jonathan Wellons wrote how a colleague who has never been a web developer before expects to understand JavaScript quickly by learning its syntax.

Commenters on the post do not anticipate things will be that easy for the colleague, who has a background working in programming in multi-threaded environments. One response, from Paul Laroquod, summarized the colleague’s prospects with a humorous response:

Your colleague thinks he’s going to basically read the javascript spec and then be able to program in it. You should be laughing in his face. When he gets wind of all of the exceptions and unexpected, undocumented behaviour on all the various browsers he needs to code for, he’ll start to get really frustrated and wonder whether the web was designed by an idiot savant in between bouts of counting spilled toothpicks.

For the record, Tim Berners-Lee has never been known to have any particular affection for totaling up toothpicks.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

2006 WebAwards Deadline Extended

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 17:56:23 +0000

The Web Marketing Association announced it has extended the deadline for submitting sites for consideration to June 15th.

The 2006 WebAwards call for entries has been extended, the association announced on its blog. Those awards will recognize the best in web development.

The extension allows final entries to be submitted and current entries to be tweaked before the judging takes place. The WMA discussed some of the details behind its awards in the blog entry:

Web sites are judged on design, innovation, content, technology, interactivity, navigation and ease of use.

Each WebAward entry is judged against other entries in its industry category and then against an overall standard of excellence.

A Best of Industry WebAward, a handsome plaque with the image of the winning site embossed, will be given in each of the 96 industry categories, including financial services, medical, small business, travel, advertising, transportation, and government.

New categories for this year include Healthcare Providers, Medical Equipment, Fashion and Technology.

Sponsors like SimpleFeed and MacWorld support the WebAwards, which have grown in status over the years. Last year, the WMA dubbed National Geographic’s Inside The Mafia website the best in show for 2005.

This will be the tenth year the WebAwards have been conducted. With a few days left until the deadline, web developers have some time remaining to submit their creations for consideration for this year’s awards.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

WebAwards Judge and Call for Entries

Lee Odden — Fri, 05 May 2006 21:41:12 +0000

I am happy to congratulate our very talented blogmaster and SEO designer, Thomas McMahon for being selected by the Web Marketing Association as a judge for the 2006 WebAwards competition!

This is impressive as employees from companies ranging from Disney to Organic to Warner Brothers have participated as judges for this program over the past 10 years.

You can be sure Thomas will bring a very unique perspective to his judging with his deep web design, SEO and blog experience. In fact, there is a new category for blogs this year. Maybe next year they can add a category for search marketing web sites!

The Web Marketing Association’s call for entries will continue until May 31 and winners will be announced September 20th, 2006. To see the kinds of prominent agencies and corporations that are involved, here’s a list of WebAward winners from 2005.

Getting awards for your web site used to be a popular traffic and link building tactic in the late nineties up until 2002 or so until everyone started doing it. Now online web awards have have pretty much all died out except for 2 or three of the most prominent and credible programs. WebAwards is one of those few programs.

If you and/or your clients have a great web site or blog, visit the WebAward.org site and enter. It could be a great online and offline promotion opportunity.

Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.

Gaming Sites, Great; PR Sites, No

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:29:38 +0000

Public relations, an industry of professional communicators, not only scored at the bottom of all categories in the “Internet Standards Assessment Report,” but also apparently could not copywrite an effective flu shot campaign during an epidemic.

When it comes to website effectiveness, the Web Marketing Association thinks gaming, music, and sports sites do the best job with the available technology, AdRants reported.

As for radio, search engine, and public relations sites, well, they don’t fare quite as well. Search engines get a pass because the public seems to favor the Spartan look of Google, which has been imitated on the search homepages for Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.

Radio sites tend to jam so many elements on their homepages that visiting one poses an uncomfortable viewing experience. That’s very true of the stations that broadcast in and around the WebProNews home base of Lexington, Kentucky. Visiting local radio websites is like viewing someone’s web design portfolio circa 1996.

As for PR sites, the study found a lot of room for improvement in ranking the industry among the lowest for innovations, the article noted in quoting William Rice, president of the Web Marketing Association:

Notably, public relations scored lowest for copywriting, even though it is an industry known for effective communication. According to Rice, “It’s likely that PR practitioners focus more on developing their clients’ sites, while their own sites suffer from typical ‘brochure-ware.’ Another possibility is that the low scores reflect the informal nature of the Internet and the backlash over over-edited, corporate speak.”

We understand that Neil French, the legendary copywriter, is likely available for projects these days. Maybe the PR folks should give him a call.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.