Web Design Awards Tips
Read these 9 Web Design Awards Tips tips to make your life smarter, better, faster and wiser. Each tip is approved by our Editors and created by expert writers so great we call them Gurus. LifeTips is the place to go when you need to know about Web Design tips and hundreds of other topics.
Frontpage Web Designs
Some award winning and well designed Frontpage templates can be found at Frontpage-Templates.org. This site categorizes and ranks other sites that have Frontpage templates available for free or to buy. These designs are varied and include personal, business and professional web designs.
However, because Frontpage is a proprietary piece of software, the availability of award winning templates that are free is severely limited. Usually, you will have to pay to get a Frontpage template that has won awards or that has been written by a firm or person that has received awards in the past. While the downside is that you will have to pay to get an award winning web design template, the upside is that it will be professionally designed and implemented by an award winning web designer.
Wordpress Web Designs
Wordpress, the popular open source blogging software, has different designs (known as 'themes') that can be applied to drastically change the look and feel of the pages.
Some of these designs have won awards, such as the Connections theme and the Red Train theme (both of which are available at themes.wordpress.net). These themes are clean, fast loading, visually appealing and conform to international Internet standards. And because Wordpress is an open source, the themes are free and can be modified however you see fit.
This is useful for a wide variety of users, since some wordpress web designs can be used for blogs, some for eCommerce sites and some web designs have been created for professional and business websites. Wordpress web designs are available for nearly every conceivable application and are easy to implement and use.
Free Award Winning Web Designs
Free award winning web designs can generally be found from organizations or sites that create and host open source designs. Pages like Studio7Designs.com have designs that have won technical and non-technical awards, and that are free to use and modify as you see fit.
If you download and use a design from such a site, then you will be able to either use it in the form that won the original award, or you can change it to suit your individual needs. Such web designs are useful if you want to be quickly indexed on a search engine or want to readily attract new users with a great design.
Some designs are also useful for certain applications. For example, some types of free award winning web designs are perfect for blogs, eCommerce sites or business websites; it just depends on the design.
Award Winning Web Designers
Some award winning web designers come from firms like 352Media.com, Coding Monkeys and Falcon Visual. These web design firms have employees that have won the firms both technical and non-technical awards.
By searching for web designers on websites such as DesignFirms.org, which gives out web design awards, you can be reasonably confident that the individual or firm that you are employing has adequate experience and technical expertise to design your website according to the latest international Internet standards, and that the quality of the work will be high.
These types of web design firms will not re-use web designs, but will instead create a completely new design for their clients should they wish it, which leads to higher quality work and a more unique experience for the people who will be visiting the websites. Have a unique design is also good for companies, since they'll be able to project a professional image to their customers that is different from their competition.
2006 Web Design Awards
Several 2006 web design award winners came from the DesignFirms 2006 awards website. They include 206 Studios, Cellar Door Creative and dik.media. Other sites that are not web design firms that garnered awards include Anna Griffin (a stationary products website), C1s Design (a website about lighting designs) and Channel M, the homepage of a non-traditional marketing company.
DesignFirms gives out awards based on site design, compliance with international web standards and site loading time. Originality of the site design is of extreme importance, since many websites are designed with cookie cutter methods of using free templates or templates that come with popular website building software( such as Frontpage or Dreamweaver).
Compliance with international web standards is necessary for reliable access to a website. Sit loading time is also important because many people do not yet have broadband Internet access.
Award Winning Web Design Firms
Some award winning web design firms include DesignWorks (founded in 1990 in the Silicon Valley), Evenson Design and 352Media.com, a design firm that has won numerous technical and non-technical awards.
The awards these firms have received are based upon their experience in the business of web design, their customer service record, their level of expertise and the quality of their website along with the websites or print media that they produce.
Generally, award winning web design firms can be found by doing a search online or by looking for them in the local yellow pages. Things to look for when searching for award winning web design firms are awards that have been given by other design firms, websites that clearly demonstrate why they won the awards and an easily accessible portfolio for you to browse through.
The Purpose of Web Design Awards
Web design awards were created in the early years of the Internet as a way for people to showcase their websites. Because personal websites were just coming into popularity, people enjoyed having ways to show off what they had designed to other people.
Early websites were also often roughly designed, so any new sites that were aesthetically pleasing were deemed worthy of an award. The awards served as a way to mark that their pages had good designs and to serve as a way for people to find websites that were considered good enough to receive an award.
In more recent years, as personal websites have become extremely common, most of the early web design awards no longer hold the same meaning as they used to. The commonality of software like Frontpage or Dreamweaver, which can be used by anyone to create websites, has also contributed to the lessening significance of the web design award.
Web Design Awards
Two of the first popular web design awards were the Golden Web Award and the Diamond Web Award. These awards have been around for several years, and have become so common that their presence on a website is no real indicator of the quality of the site.
Other, smaller awards have taken the place of the larger web design awards. These awards come from places like ComputerArts.co.uk and GAWDS.org. These sites have monthly awards where the code of the competing websites is available to be viewed by voters. Because of the openness of the awards, they are thought to be more meaningful than other, more traditional awards.
Award Winning Web Design
Award winning web designs are usually designs that show off proper coding techniques, color coordination, adherence to standards, are easy to navigate and are aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
The website DesignFirms.org awards monthly and yearly awards to websites that it considers to be well-designed or that conform to standards set down by international Internet organizations like WC3.
These sites are varied and come from different genres, such as FairwayLife.com (a site devoted to golfing), Artage-Design.com (an interior design website) and LoftStyles.ca (a website devoted to providing real estate advice in Canada). All of these January 2007 winners have websites that are well-designed, clean, fast-loading and conform to XML, CSS and HTML standards, which makes them award winning web design.
| Guru Spotlight |
| Christina Chan |
