Web Awards - The Growth Of Web Awards, The Webby Awards, The Golden Web Awards, MÉdaille D'or For Web Site Excellence

The evolution of Web sites from bland depositories of information to sophisticated and user-friendly entities of conscious design carried with it a growing tendency to recognize the achievements of intelligent, artistic, and useful Web design practices with awards. There were countless Web awards created by the early 2000s, ranging from the relatively anonymous to the highly prestigious. Awards were sponsored by established organizations and followed by pundits and Web aficionados alike. In addition, many magazines—both hardcopy and online—issued awards for excellent Web achievements in fields of interest to their readers. Lastly, awards cater to different audiences. Some are devoted mainly to popular recognition by average users, while others recognize technical excellence as judged by professional peers. Accordingly, then, some Web awards are highly sought after by Web designers, while others are essentially giveaways of which the recipients may not even be aware.

Awards Scoop categorized Web awards into six types.

• First, elite awards were the most highly prized, and were the most competitive, since the prestige generally carried other benefits, such as increased user traffic at the site.
• The second category covered awards based on professional recognition. While these were also relatively serious awards, they were not as hotly contested since the audience for them was more insular than for elite awards.
• Third, promotional Web awards were those that Web sites sponsored in part to have the winners somehow promote the award-granting site or entity by placing a mark of the award—and perhaps a link to the presenter's site—on their winning Web sites.
• Fourth, popular awards based on the votes of average users were often significant, but not as hotly contested, since they tend to be less prominent and their criteria highly subjective.
• The fifth category included what Awards Scoop called the "everybody wins" awards, which are mainly presented as a way to draw traffic to the presenter's own site. Such awards tend to be very loosely distributed, and thus the standards for winning are rather low.
• Finally, noncompetitive awards were issued usually to children or amateurs primarily to encourage them to continue in their development efforts.