Judges

2012 Judges

Judd and Helen have been working with an exhaustive list of judging applicants to bring you only the finest in freshly-squeezed AWA Judges. Here's the list so far for 2012:

Australians

Internationals

Sally Bagshaw

Sally is a copywriter and content strategist based in Brisbane. She’s been having a love affair with words for over 15 years, the past few running the successful copywriting business Snappy Sentences.

Sally thinks great content is readable, consistent and has personality. For businesses, content needs to be a persuasive conversation with the reader, an engaging story, a problem solver.

She’s written about content on Johnny Holland and Pro Copy Tips, and shares her copywriting insight on the Snappy Sentences blog. She also writes about how businesses can better manage their content on her own content strategy blog. Recently, Sally has started a content strategy meetup group in Brisbane.

When not writing, Sally can be found on Twitter, playing Words With Friends, or completely offline in her garden.


Vivienne Conway

Vivienne Conway is the Director of Web Key IT Pty Ltd. which provides accessibility services including testing, accreditation, training and consulting. She is currently working on a PhD in Information Technology at Edith Cowan University in Perth WA, with an emphasis on website accessibility in Australia. Vivienne is a member of a number of W3C working groups including the Research and Development Working Group and the Evaluation Methodology Task Force.


Simon Pascal Klein

Pascal is a standardista graphic, web and front-end designer, and a rampant typophile.

Born in Mainz, Germany—the birthplace of Gutenberg—he now works in Canberra as a contract designer and studies at the Australian National University. He’s been actively engaged in the Open Source community and local web industry, notably as one of the unorganisers to first bring BarCamp to Canberra.

He enjoys drinking in as much good type as he can get and has been happily bending beziers since 2004.


 

Richard Parker

Richard is a digital strategist with 12 years experience working across digital disciplines including web design and build, online and email marketing, social media and search. He also has extensive experience in custom publishing and sales promotions. He believes in telling stories about brands, and using content through multiple channels to drive customer engagement. He also believes in making his clients look good, and having a good time.

Rich recently moved to Sydney from London, where he was strategy director and co-owner at integrated marketing agency, Better Things (www.better-things.co.uk), after over ten years working with agencies Story Worldwide (www.storyworldwide.com), Seven (www.seven.co.uk), and Large Design. Rich has worked with a large number of brands including ASOS.com, Coca-Cola, Estee Lauder, Johnson & Johnson and Magners Irish Cider. He moved to Sydney in March to take up his current position as head of digital with content agency Edge (www.edgecustom.com.au), where he has been busy helping to develop and promote the content marketing category in Australia. Rich is a course tutor with ADMA, and helped them to develop and launch their inaugural one day course in Content Marketing, and recently spoke at Sydney's mUmBRELLA 360 conference on brand storytelling.


Paul Arlott

Paul Arlott founded TOLRA Micro Systems Ltd (UK) in 1997 and provides web hosting and development services to clients all over the world.

Paul began his career in the aviation industry building functional prototype displays for human factor analysis and was involved in running the trials. This type of work has allowed him a deep understanding of the importance of continual client collaboration for the duration of a project. He has extensive experience in C/C++ which provided a sound foundation for expanding to PHP and MySQL development which is now almost exclusively his development platform.

Paul has a holistic approach to developing websites and building network infrastructures, understanding the need for industry standards and requirements laid out by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Paul joined forces with Attitude e-media in 2010.

Paul was one of the first developers to build an accessible directory to industry standards, which is still being used by some of the major online directories, more recently he has built his own CMS.

Through the exploration and use of mobile technology Paul has been able to free himself from the traditional office desk while maintaining an exemplary level of customer service. He has recently set up all his mobile devices to interact with his server environments so he can operate his business from anywhere there is a wired, WiFi or any type of internet connection.

Paul believes in building light weight flexible websites which are engineered to survive compatibility challenges and intermittent or slow service connections.


Michael Cassius

Michael Cassius is the founder of creative studio, Cassius. Based in Melbourne, Cassius has been producing high-impact designs for web and print for over a decade. His long journey from junior to senior designer across numerous agencies around Australia has seen him work with a vast arrey of household brands in the fashion, finance and retail industries.

Today as the principal of Cassius, he specialises in 'emotive' works, which, "should resonate a solid and clear message". It's no secret that his intimate understanding of developing brand loyalty and intuitive experiences has led to a high demand from national and international organisations.

Michael is also well known for his skilled contributions to local and international charities and not-for-profits. This year he accepted the invitation to join the board of 'Tunes for Change' - an established not-for-profit that works alongside celebrated music artists such as Nick Cave, for causes of human, environmental, sustainability and media accountability.

As a result of being aligned with, Greenpeace, US based Avaaz.org and our very own political thorn, GetUp!, has naturally positioned Michael as the go-to-talent for charities, politicals and not-for-profits - not to mention the growing base of new and established music artists.


Matt Voerman

Based out of Sydney, Australia - Matt is a 15 year veteran of the digital media industry. During this time he has held a number of senior technical and customer facing roles, including: application developer, information architect, digital media consultant, team lead, and technical account manager.

This breadth of experience has seen him undertake engagements, in a number of geographies, including: Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, China, Hong Kong and the United States. With companies such as Adobe, Akamai,

He is an internationally published author, having written, or contributed to, a number of books, whitepapers and articles on digital media and the Adobe Flash Platform.

An excellent communicator, and recognised public speaker, Matt has presented at local, and international, industry events, and is just as at home interacting with C-Suite executives, as he is with technical teams.


David Vuu

David is a multi-award winning UI/UX Designer working at one of Australia's biggest online company as well as running several online businesses. During his career he has had the pleasure of working directly with, or on projects for top tier clients both nationally and internationally such as: Porsche Australia, Peroni UK, Fox Studios, Whirlpool, ICON Movies and many more.


Dale Hansen

After developing his first website, Console Database, in 2000, Dale Hansen went on to start his own web design business, Base Media, in 2003. The business has produced websites for a range of companies, organisations and individuals both in Australia and overseas and has recently shifted its focus to building up its own network of service-oriented sites, the latest being Deals United, a daily deals aggregator for the Australian and New Zealand market.

Dale has also taught a range of IT-related courses at Griffith University, most recently teaching Business students how to plan and build websites using WordPress. Dale has a passion for web technologies like HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL and finds great satisfaction in writing clean, standards-compliant code that conforms to accessibility standards.

Dale is @Dale_Hansen on Twitter.


Cassidy Poon

Cassidy Poon is the National Marketing Manager for LogicalTech Group. LogicalTech have been translating business needs into technology solutions since 1986. He sits on the Victorian State Board of Australian Marketing Institute as a Victorian Councillor and is an associate member of the Australia and New Zealand Mental Health Association. He has worked in B2B and B2C start-ups through state and national expansion and has experience in digital, online and social marketing, budgeting, product development, advertising, tradeshows, sponsorships, PR and more.

The primary focus of my role is to provide strategic advice to the stakeholders, senior management and team members across the portfolio of organizations that I've been part of that helps define and maintain their brand positioning (online and offline) and aligns with their organisational objectives. I've commissioned and managed market research projects on an annual basis and devise, implement and regularly review a strategic marketing, advertising and public relations plan for the portfolio of brands I've worked on. Complementing the overarching strategy, I'm responsible to create long term and tactical marketing plans for the promotion of a wide range of product offerings and services at increasing engagement with key audiences onsite and online.

Aligned with the organisation's strategic objectives, all the marketing plans I've developed will maximise the opportunities offered by digital/social media as well as traditional communications channels to build collection access and increase profitability of the organisation.


Gian Wild

Gian Wild is the Director of AccessibilityOz. She has worked in accessibility industry since 1998. Her major achievements include: the very first Australian accessible web site; the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games; her six years active membership in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group; accessibility reviews of public and private web sites; conference and seminar presentations; judging web awards and the development of accessibility toolkits.


Ben Tollady

Ben Tollady is a user experience designer, usability consultant & user interface designer hailing from Oxford in the UK. Now living and working in Melbourne, Australia, he's the user experience director and co-founder of user experience design consultancy, Thirst Studios. He's one of those irritating people you've heard about that do what they love every day and get to call it a job.

Originally qualified as an industrial designer, Ben has been applying his interest in the relationship between people and products to his work in design for the web since the mid nineties. He's passionate about developing useful, simple, easy-to-use online experiences that are a pleasure to use and has worked on a wide variety of projects, ranging from online marketing and small brochure sites to large enterprise-level transactional web applications and complex systems.

Aside from his work at Thirst, Ben also co-curates a regular technology meet-up in Melbourne - Melbourne Geek Night - and occasionally speaks and writes about online experience design, techniques and technologies.

You can find out more about him and see examples of his work at his personal site and dribble account. He regularly tweets at @tollady and sometimes blogs on Tumblr.


Jason Hutchinson

Jason is the National Creative Director and a Partner at Deloitte Digital who has over 20 years design communication experience, specialising for the last 15 years in the digital and user-experience fields. He has designed and implemented award-winning digital projects for some of Australia's largest organisations.

Jason graduated from Curtin University, Western Australia with a BA in Design and worked in a number of boutique print and branding creative agencies before joining the Eclipse Group where he helped establish their creative and digital offerings. The Eclipse Group grew to be one of Australia's largest digital agencies and was fully acquired by Deloitte in 2002 with a staff of over 100 people in 3 states.

In the years since, Jason has continued to work for Deloitte Digital and was appointed as the National Creative Director in 2010. As part of a fantastic team, and in just two short years, Jason has doubled the size of the creative team, currently around 40 people and helped establish Deloitte Digital Globally as a leader of digital and creative services.

Jason has worked with a variety of organizations across different industries including automotive, government, financial services, and travel. He has a passion for creating strategically sound, idea driven solutions and has extensive experience in delivering large scale user experience consulting and implementation projects across both traditional web and mobile.


Michael Ott

Michael is a thirteen year veteran of front/back-end web design and development, a UI/UX designer, a usability evangelist and a practitioner of W3C guidelines, so expect plenty of preaching and finger wagging when you discuss these subjects with him. Consider yourself warned.

Over the years Michael has held senior roles at some of Perth's most recognisable web development companies, and these days he is the Senior Web Developer & Designer at Stormbox where his focus is on delivering web site projects that often coincide with marketing campaigns, and generally keeping everything web related running smooth.

Although his friends think he's crazy, Michael's idea of fun involves experimenting with code in his spare time and he occasionally extends that into other activities such as making custom plug-ins for Wordpress, Extensions for Chrome, dabbling in Android application development, and writing about web industry topics and other boring stuff on his blog. Apparently all that constitutes fun.

If the legend is to be believed, Michael has not been in contact with direct sunlight since 1999. If you'd like to make contact with Michael and perhaps encourage him to go outside, you could follow him on Twitter, Dribble or Google+.


Simon Eder

Loves beautiful usable design, web standards and is passionate about helping business owners leverage the web to save time and money and increase sales.

Simon has a divers background having worked in many different industries, owned and operated several businesses. From 12 years of flying helicopters in diverse places Transporting scientists and tourists in Antarctica, looking for US MIA's in Cambodia, flying tourists through the magical and majestic Kimberley and 3 years as a pearl diver in Broome, Simon has followed his many passions.

Simon built his first website in 1996 when stuck in the desert waiting for clients and eventulay led him to Central Tafe where he lectured in computers, webdesign and web marketing. This rich tapestry enables Simon to create innovative solutions and ideas for his client base as the owner of Oolybooly.com.au, a website design and marketing agency based in Perth WA.


Sonja Bernhardt

As technology entrepreneur and owner of award winning software development firm ThoughtWare Sonja Bernhardt OAM demonstrates a passion (almost addiction) for awards, having judged multiple technology awards over the past 17 years including:

  • Secrets of Australian IT Awards
  • Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA)
  • Australian Institute of Project Management Awards
  • Women in Technology Awards
  • ICT Challenge Awards
  • Australian Web Awards

April Garvey

April Garvey combines over 15 years of online consumer marketing successes from a diverse range of organizations such as Wall Street giants Citibank and GMAC, digital pioneers Kanoodle.com and Etrade.com, and most recently international software giant Rosetta Stone, where April directed online marketing and web strategy in the US, UK, DE, and JP.

April has first-hand experience working on both the online retail side as well as experience developing advertising networks on the publisher side. She served as Vice President of New Product Development for Kanoodle.com, a pioneer in search-targeted sponsored links. Today, April leverages this insider experience to help advertisers intelligently grow their online business.

In addition to being a mom, wife, dog lover, gadget geek and wicked funny joke teller, April is currently running her own online consulting company called Web By Numbers (www.webbynumbers.com), located just outside of Dulles, VA, alongside AOL, Network Solutions and Omniture/Adobe. April has degrees in Marketing (BA), Instructional Technology (MA) and her MBA. April is @AprilGarvey on Twitter.


Justin Brown

Justin is a Senior Lecturer within the School of Computer and Security Science at Edith Cowan University. Justin lecturers in web programming and web application design and coordinates the new Bachelor of Science (Web Technology) degree. Justin’s PhD is in the field of E-Learning, and currently publishes and supervises doctoral students in the field of E-Learning and Web Accessibility. Justin has recently become an invited expert in the W3C Research and Development Work Group on web accessibility.


Cindy Prosser

You could say that Cindy's home revolves around the web & you wouldn't be far wrong. Cindy's partner Paul Arlott (yes, he's also a judge) is a PHP Programmer/Systems Administrator, and her daughter Nikkita Dixon is a social media journalist at iiNet & co-hosts a social media TV program called #thebuzz. Cindy herself has been a front-end developer since the 1990's, owns a few directories including an Australian travel guide called Absolutely Australia.

After living in Ottawa, Canada for a couple of years, Cindy relocated to Western Australia in 2001 & hung her Attitude e-media Web Studio shingle in Mandurah, Western Australia, where she has traded from ever since.

Cindy loves travelling & backpacking around the world and takes her office with her. She’s built websites from a tent in Scotland while it bucketed with rain outside, to becoming even more mobile & building them while a passenger touring around. So it's important to her that she be able to access & manage websites online and on-the-go. With this in mind she helped conceptually with the development of the AttitudeCMS.


Chris Roberts

Chris Roberts has worked in digital marketing in the education and not-for-profit sectors for more than five years. As the Digital Marketing Manager at the Brotherhood of St Laurence, an Australian welfare organisation, Chris is responsible for developing and managing the Brotherhood's online marketing strategy and digital content.

Chris' broad knowledge and experience includes online and social media, digital advocacy, e-marketing and online relationship management, online promotions and acquisition, improving user experiences and online conversion. His passion is galvanising online audiences to act on behalf of a charity or cause through online advocacy, volunteer work or fundraising.


Scott Hollier

Scott Hollier is a Project Manager and the Western Australia Manager for Media Access Australia, a not-for-profit, public benevolent institution. Scott's work focuses on making computers and Internet-related technologies accessible to people with disabilities. Scott also represents MAA on the Advisory Committee of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organisation primarily responsible for developing and promoting access to media through technology for people with disabilities.

Scott has completed a PhD titled 'The Disability Divide: an examination into the needs of computing and Internet-related technologies on people who are blind or vision impaired', and has a background in Computer Science and a wealth of experience in both the information technology and not-for-profit sectors. Scott is legally blind and as such understands the importance of access at a personal level.


Ben Buchanan

Ben Buchanan started creating web pages 16 years ago, while completing a degree in everything but I.T.

He worked on three generations of Griffith University's corporate website and redeveloped several News Limited sites including The Australian and AusIT. He was the Frontend Architect for the ground-up rebuild of News Digital Media's CMS, which powers the metropolitan mastheads, The Australian and news.com.au.

He was a contributer to the Opera WSC, which now forms the core of the W3C Web Standards Curriculum.

He is now Team Lead of Atlassian's cross-product UI library team and writes at the 200ok weblog.


Bill Harper

Bill spent ten years editing technical documents for a government department (or, as he puts it, "turning them into something the rest of the organisation could understand"). And in that time he wrestled with some of the worst writing he’s ever seen. Don’t believe him? How about an 83-word sentence where the only punctuation is a full stop at the end?

He's now a full-time freelance writer and editor, working on books for publishing companies such as Five Simple Steps. He’s also edited numerous e-books, and written copy about everything from luxury real estate to the renting whitegoods.

But as much as he loves his new role ("The sentences are so much shorter now"), Bill also plans for his own writing. He wants to resurrect his long-forgotten humour column, and possibly write a book about the joys of online dating. ("I may as well get something out of it all.")

But for now Bill is happy to immerse himself in other people’s words—and delete a lot of them. At least it gives him an excuse for his website still being "under construction".


Lachy Groom

Lachy is the founder of 4 successful online businesses including consumer facing startups, front-end consultancies and an eCommerce startup. He had his first successful exit at the age of 15 and since then he has sold multiple companies, spoken at conferences and has participated in discussions related to online education and the future of programming education.

Lachy currently advises Dev Bootcamp, a 10-week intensive Ruby on Rails training program in San Francisco, CA. In his capacity at Dev Bootcamp he provides expertise in marketing and PR and he has spoken on "The Future of For Profit Education".

In addition to his work at Dev Bootcamp, Lachy is traveling the world, learning to become a better programmer and providing front-end consultancy work for startups.


2011 Judges

The previous judges for the 2011 Australian Web Awards where:

Australians

Internationals

  • April Garvey, USA
  • Miraz Jordan, New Zealand
  • Jenn Lukas, USA
  • Chris Mills, UK
  • Micheil Smith, UK
  • Nicolas Steenhout, New Zealand

2010 Judges

The previous judges for the 2010 Australian Web Awards where:

Australians

  • Dmitry Baranovskiy, NSW
  • Gary Barber, WA
  • Sonja Bernhardt, QLD
  • Nathanael Boehm, ACT
  • Ben Buchanan, NSW
  • Warren Duff, WA
  • Simon Eder, WA
  • Ruth Ellison, ACT
  • Jessica Enders, WA
  • Linda Gehard, NSW
  • Penny Hagen, NSW
  • Nic Hodge, NSW
  • Keith Lang, ACT
  • Ben Melbourne, QLD
  • Duncan Riley, VIC
  • Russ Weakley, NSW
  • Gian Wild, VIC
  • Ben Winter-Giles, ACT

Internationals

  • Mike Brown, New Zealand
  • Leslie Doherty, USA
  • April Garvey, USA
  • Chris Mills, UK
  • Brandy Shapiro-Babin, USA
  • Nicolas Steenhout, New Zealand

2009 Judges

The previous judges for the 2009 Australian Web Awards where:

Australians

  • Cameron Adam, NSW
  • Matt Balara, NSW
  • Steve Baty, NSW
  • Sonja Bernhardt, QLD
  • Ben Buchanan, NSW
  • Megyn Carpenter, QLD
  • Matt Didcoe, WA
  • Simon Eder, WA
  • Ruth Ellison, ACT
  • Nick Hodge, NSW
  • Marc Lehmann, NSW
  • Lawrence Meckan, QLD
  • Russ Weakley, NSW
  • Matt Voermann, NSW
  • Kevin Yank, VIC

The Australian Web Awards brought to you by:

Australian Web Industry Association

Important Dates

  • July 2013

    Award Entries Open

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