Web Directions

McFarlane Prize for 2008 launches

• In: Blog
• By:Maxine
• July 10, 2008
• Leave a response

Nominations are now open for the McFarlane Prize for Excellence in Australian Web Design for 2008.

Now in its third year, the prize rec­og­nizes and encour­ages excel­lence in web design by Australian web pro­fes­sion­als. We’re really proud of hav­ing cre­ated and nur­tured the prize — it’s been extremely reward­ing over the years to hear feed­back regard­ing how it has helped peo­ple moti­vate their organ­i­sa­tions to cre­ate beau­ti­fully designed sites with atten­tion paid to usabil­ity, web stan­dards and acces­si­bil­ity. The best of the web.

Each year so far has seen increas­ingly stiff com­pe­ti­tion, and exam­ples of gen­uinely great design and imple­men­ta­tion in the win­ning sites: Museum Victoria’s Caught and Coloured in 2006 and Michael Koukoullis’ Andrews Must Resign last year in 2007.

Judging

The thing that we believe sets this prize apart from other indus­try awards is the judg­ing process. Asking judges to adju­di­cate on scores of sites over the whole gamut of web exper­tise — from web stan­dards to acces­si­bil­ity, visual design to usabil­ity and so on — sim­ply doesn’t take advan­tage of that area of spe­cialised exper­tise which is the rea­son you asked them to be a judge in the first place. To put it bluntly, it dimin­ishes all of us. But what to do as an alternative?

For the first two years we have used the fact that there is machine test­ing for acces­si­bil­ity and adher­ence to web stan­dards to cre­ate a sim­ple first round of judg­ing. We then passed on the remain­ing 20 or 30 sites to our judges to rank indi­vid­u­ally in their area of expertise.

• Accessibility — Andrew Arch (2006) and Gian Wild (2007)
• Usability — Lisa Herrod (2006) and Donna Maurer (2007)
• Design — Pete Ottery (2006) and Andy Coffey (2007)
• Coding — Dean Jackson (2006) and Dmitry Baranovskiy (2007)

But what became appar­ent last year was that this process was priv­i­leg­ing web stan­dards and acces­si­bil­ity over design and usabil­ity and that as time went on the issue was going to arise of some truly excel­lent sites being knocked out unfairly in that first round because of our very high stan­dards there. So, this year we are relax­ing on web stan­dards and acces­si­bil­ity just a lit­tle in that first round, but at the same time intro­duc­ing an aspect of assess­ing on visual design at this stage as well.

Nominating

You can nom­i­nate your­self, or any­one else, by going here. The prize is open to any Australian designer or team for a site launched or sig­nif­i­cantly upgraded between August 1 2007 and August 31 2008. You need to get that nom­i­na­tion in by August 31 as well.

One response to “McFarlane Prize for 2008 launches”:

1. • By:neil
   • July 11th, 2008
   

   great to have a prize for web design, keeps peo­ple striv­ing to improve. I think the points men­tioned of Accessibility, Usability, Design and Coding should be noted by all designers

Your opinion: