News
National final in Perth
Join us at the national final - a black tie dinner and awards night to celebrate this year's high-achieving web projects. We'll be on the red carpet at King's Park's award-winning Fraser's Restaurant so you're welcome to dress to the nines and bring anyone you'd like to impress or share something special with. Australia's top developers, designers, proprietors and consultants will be there.
We'll be sharing the judges' thoughts and there will be optional dancing, though no Michael Jackson songs. It's a big night. Here is your Call to Action.
South Australian & NT winners
Congratulations to South Australian and Northern Territory winners in the 2015 Australian Web Awards.
Hop over to Perth for the national final on November 6th.
| Personal | BrainHackr by David Walker & Andrew McGiffert |
| Education | Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods by Captovate |
| Not for Profit | Off the Leash by Captovate |
Queensland winners
Queensland winners in the 2015 Australian Web Awards.
| Commercial | QSuper by Deloitte Digital |
| RACQ by Deloitte Digital |
Victorian & Tasmanian winners
Congratulations to Victorian and Tasmanian winners in the 2015 Australian Web Awards. Hope to see you all in Perth for the national event.
| Personal | Red Hongyi by Chromatix |
| eCommerce | Three65 by Emote Digital |
| Education | Lakeside College by Chromatix |
| Commercial | Coles Financial Services by Coles Financial Services |
| Doghouse by Doghouse | |
| Brown Brothers Colourful Conversations by Get Started | |
| Small Business | Cycle2 by Walker Designs (TAS) |
| Government | Healthy Together Achievement Program by Blick Creative |
| Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability by Weave | |
| State Revenue Office Victoria by Webplace | |
| Worksafe | Injury Hotspots Tool by Worksafe & Butterfly | |
| Social Media | What's your name game? by Retail Zoo |
| Innovation | Brown Brothers Colourful Conversations by Get Started |
WA winners
Congratulations to West Australian winners in the 2015 Australian Web Awards. Here are their names and addresses:
Big sites and little sites
We've just finished validating entries using Jaime Iniesta's Site Validator tool. It's excellent, it's elegant and it lets you decide how deep you want to dig into a site. In our case, 200 pages.
Median number of errors per page; 8. We eliminated sites with 20 errors per page or more. Those entries will still be read and if the validation errors are explained, we'll review.
Here's the break-up of errors by site size:
One page sites: 4.5
Small sites, 2 - 99 pages: 6.0
Medium sites, 100 - 199 pages: 3.5
Big sites, 200 + pages: 11.0
Working hypothesis is that some small sites are entered by less experienced developers and therefore contain a larger numbers of errors. But if that's true, why are sites 200 pages plus prone to three times as many errors as medium sites? Is it that they're older and subject to legacy factors, or just that the businesses are larger? Or something else?
The fact that medium sites have less errors than small sites says that size is not inherently a problem. We looked at the age of sites by checking their earliest indexing in Archive.org. Not perfect, but an indication. Medium-sized sites have been around for only four years and four months, but big sites averaged nine years and one month!
This year we have a category for Startups; businesses less than two years old. Those sites have more pages than the Small Business category and around the same number as the Education category. But a quarter the number of validation errors. So it's likely that newer frameworks, and less legacy factors confer an advantage. In that respect it's good we've separated out those newer sites.
The Awards now take more account of the complexity of development. If you've had to integrate seven different databases in your build, you'll be relatively advantaged over a small, simple site. *Hat tip to Geoff Bowers of Daemon.
PHOTO: Hawk-Eye Innovations
On show
Great work Australian agencies and developers who took to heart the #shareyourvictories meme and entered the Australian Web Awards. This year 70 of the 173 entrants took the opportunity to publish their freshly minted sites, giving the Australian business community a very time-efficient way of sampling who's doing what. We'll be promoting the page over coming months.
Extensions
We know real-world business can get in the way of meeting other deadlines.
If your entry is in DRAFT by the close date - Friday 21st August, we'll give you until Monday midnight EST to complete and pay for it. 'Draft' means your contacts are in there and so is the URL of the site.
Good luck, and congratulations to those who've already completed entries!
Share your victories
We're open. Entering the Australian Web Awards tells your staff and your clients that you value web standards and are proud of your work. This year you have a chance to publish a version of your entry on the Australian Web Awards site. Once paid, entries can be published on a Nominations page. Please be responsible with this and act in good faith*. Your peers are watching!
Our hope is that this will highlight the different approaches developers take and showcase how you resolved the challenges.
*We do reserve the right to selectively publish.
New categories
The Startup category is open to any commercial business that at as of July 1st this year has been operating (trading) for less than two years.
If your business turned over less than $2 million in the twelve months prior to July 1st you can enter the Small Business category. And if you qualify for both, you can choose which you enter...
We've introduced these categories so that smaller budget sites are not competing with very large ones. You can only enter a site in one category unless you're entering the Innovation category. In that case you can create two separate entries for the same site - one in Innovation and one in another category.
Contact us if you need advice on which category to enter.
