With all of the travelling I was doing last week, I forgot to mention that some of the sites Dave & I have worked at Cronin and Company on took home WebAwards from the Web Marketing Association. We took home two “Outstanding Website” awards (think silver) for our sites for Middlesex Hospital and the Drink-Drive-Lose Ad Challenge. I was perticularly stoked as I was the designer of both sites and single-handedly built the Ad Challenge site which had a lot of complex application-level code behind it. We also took home a “Standard of Excellence” award (think bronze) for the site we built for Garelick Farms’ Over the Moon Milk product launch. I’m not a big fan of that site’s design (not because it wasn’t mine), but I love the game Dave built.
I was also a judge of the WebAwards (as I have been for the last few years and, no, I did not judge any sites I was involved with) and I have to say I was very pleased to see more sites moving to web standards. Out of the 15 or so I judged in the initial round, there were at least two or three that were well on their way to being exemplary in the standards world (compared to 0 only two years ago). Like most marketing-related awards, Flash always seems to trump standards, but it seems like developers are starting to cue into the standards trend more and more every year.
This year I also had the privilege of judging the Best of Show. I was pulling for Project Rebirth but National Geographic ended up taking home the top prize for Inside the Mafia which was also in my top 3 picks.
All in all, this years WebAwards were pretty good to us (and a step up from the two “Standard of Excellence” awards we pulled last year for Ride4Ever and Bertucci’s Restaurants). I look forward to next year’s competition as well as the one at SXSW, where we hope to go from finalist to winner this year.
