The Website Award

[RyanCesiel]

Originally Posted by user0

What exactly do website judges look for in a "winning website"? I've come up with a short list of points but, I don't know if they are all real/legitimate points. Feedback is appreciated.

- Current year content
- past year content
- visual appeal
- ease of access to specific elements through the website (i.e. get to any page with 3 clicks)
- media including photos, videos, and sound
- back end coding
- structure of website
- browser compatibility
- ease of maintaining the website (i.e. dynamic content? or hard coded html?)
- validation at w3? (http://validator.w3.org )?

am I missing anything?

I've found that coding practices don't really matter because I've seen websites that have terrible coding and that don't validate still win. For browser compatibility, it's safe to assume your judge will be using either Internet Explorer (hopefully not older version like IE6!!) or Firefox. Make sure your website works in at least those two.

The most important thing will be your content. Make sure it's up-to-date and fresh. Having plenty of pictures to supplement it is also helpful (makes it easier to read). Having a large media gallery is also nice as well. My site has been success in Michigan and we have a MONSTER-sized media gallery (3000+ pictures, 50+ videos). Organization and navigation is also important. Like you said, it should take no more than 3 clicks to get to important content.

Originally Posted by BandChick

Team 1089 (my team) won the website award at the NJ Regional in 2006 and 2008. If you would like, please feel free to stop by our website and compare/contrast with ours (http://www.mercury1089.com ).

Great post, it's very informative and I've got it bookmarked now.

However, that being said, I'm very suprised to see Website Evaluator promoting the use of tables in a layout (http://www.mercury1089.com and your profile website). Properly designed modern websites use tables strictly for tabular data, not the layout. CSS and div tags should be used to structure the layout because tables used for layout is a big no-no in the world of web design.

I design stock templates for ThemeForest.net and they don't even accept submissions that use tables for the layout.