Web Awards - The Growth Of Web Awards

THE GROWTH OF WEB AWARDS

According to Mic Miller's "A History of Web Awards" in Awards Scoop, Web awards had their genesis in 1994 with the Best of the Web Awards program established by Brandon Plewe of the State University of New York at Buffalo. The winners were announced in May of that year at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web in Geneva, Switzerland. The winners were chosen by popular vote, and the awards' intention was to highlight the possibilities of the World Wide Web, which was at the time just beginning to hit critical mass. Thus, the Best of the Web Awards were simultaneously a recognition of emerging aesthetic and usability standards and a vast promotional effort to spread use of the Web by promoting sophisticated design standards.

Following the Best of the Web Awards, a spate of other awards sprang up in the mid-1990s, usually presenting digital badges or medals to Web sites judged excellent by the awards' criteria. Soon, Web designers shifted their design strategies from attempting to impress their loosely affiliated peers in the design community to chasing after specific awards recognized by large swaths of the Web population. In this way, Web awards contributed to the development of widely-recognized design standards. By 1995, awards began to be institutionalized. Rather than prominent individuals, awards were thus distributed by established organizations, particularly universities. Among the first of these was the University of Michigan's Cool Central, which issued new awards constantly, featuring "sites of the day" and other honors based on the opinions of established and respected judges from around the world.

Through the mid-and late 1990s, the Web grew exponentially, and it seemed like just about everyone was setting up their own Web site. At the same time, design standards evolved and tools grew more sophisticated, upping the ante for Web awards and pushing them into different niches. However, as awards proliferated, they were often used largely as a gimmick to draw more traffic to the presenter's sites. The dearth of Web awards thus threatened to dilute the meaning of awards altogether. To separate the wheat from the chaff, the Award Sites! Web site was established in 1997 by David Bancroft as a way of judging the awards themselves and creating a degree of critical distinction between them. Similar programs followed, and by the 2000s a handful of Web awards had emerged as the most highly respected and sought-after on the Web.