@omic Award Winners

Tell us what you think

Discuss our award winner sites on our message board by clicking here. Discuss the merits of our different winners, think your site was better? See what others thought of your site.

Or join our general discussion to pass on what sites you've found good for winning awards, which sites actually passed bothered to check your site out personally and which sent out auto replies?

We're moving this page! 14/08/01

So many sites are now applying for our awards that we're in the process of moving this page. You'll still find the old award winners here for a while but we'll be posting all new winners on the forums. This makes life easier for us (because it's easier to update) and we hope allows you to agree or disagree with your reviews and reviews for other sites more easily.

Here's where you'll find the @omic Gold Award Winners.

Here's where you'll find the @omic Silver Award Winners.

Here's where you'll find the @omic Bronze Award Winners.

Gold

http://36-degrees.co.uk

Umm... 'we're not worthy' springs to mind. This site is perfect in design, navigation, content, technology implementation, clearly defined audience etc etc etc. We won't even look at the meta tags because a) we assume they're effective and b) with a site this good they should be almost irrelevant. This site just shouts GOLD in capital letters for us. Many congrats to Stewart for all his efforts.

http://usesoap.port5.com

Our first gold winner! It's taken some time to agree - should this be gold or silver? We guess ultimately our award is for effective site design and while, because this site isn't built in traditional html it isn't as accessible as we'd like (we're thinking of search engine listing here), on all other criteria u.C.u.P.Z's site win's hand down. He uses a new technology (to us anyway) called blogger to create a site with rich content, excellent navigation and design clarity.

Our only criticism would be the lack of a back button in the actual site and the html index page is difficult to see where to enter - make it simple.

Silver

http://www.alexnetworking.com

A complete internet business solution, nice design easy navigation.

http://www.dimdiv.com/

Laurie Dawkins who designed this site has clearly put in a lot of effort and is a very deserving winner of the @omic Silver award. Nice use of colour provides an appealing look, and the graphics are well designed. Content is rich and well written.

Our only criticism (to explain why no gold award ;-) would be that perhaps the graphics are a bit big and could provide a slow load on 28,000 modems which we should really still be designing our sites for. The design itself is also very similar to so many other sites out there - so nothing strikingly different.

Laurie's inclusion of a forum on his site really impressed the judges here, although unfortunately not much activity on the board. Overall a really impressive site, that we will seriously consider for gold when Laurie's developed the site further.

Scraps & Scribbles: A Writer's Journal and Resource

A well planned and implemented site that loads quickly. Perhaps it could do with making it's purpose clearer in the first few second of viewing. The web is a fast place and people don't wait around - tell them quickly what you offer. The meta tags could probably do with a bit more work, they are accurate but perhaps a bit light. Generally this site has a good feel but perhaps is just missing that final gloss. The great thing about the web is you can convince people you're a serious player without having to have huge resources. You seem to have the content, give it that professional slick look and you could have the winning combination. We'd also seriously suggest ditching Yahoo Groups although they're easy to start, snitz forum is very easy to install and gives you complete control of your message board (no ads).

http://www.k3rupuk.net/

We liked this site, clear navigation, clear design and a clear audience for the site. Technology has been used where needed with the introduction of a forum, guestbook (which are generally getting a bit old hat) and dhtml. This site uses frames which we would advise against and the meta tags in the frameset page are pretty much non existent. If you want to gain traffic effective meta tags are one of the easiest ways to boost traffic. Content at first glance looks good but as you dig you soon realise it isn't very deep and some is not in English (which isn't bad thing but we feel pick a site language and be consistent throughout).

Essentially the structural elements are fine but it needs more content, ditch the frames they're not needed and hold you back and improve the meta tags.

http://www.bearclover.net

A nicely designed and focused site about Yosemite National Park in the US. This was a clear silver for us because Jacqueline has avoided many of the pit falls so many fall into. There are meta tags we'd suggest slightly more keywords with commas between each and a slightly longer description but that's all. On navigation it is clearly laid out, we would suggest making the navigation under the manner on the main screen larger, it's very easy to miss. On the content the site has original images of the park, the site talks apologies for the number of pictures. We say give us more! ;-) You'll probably find the images you post are a great source of traffic for the site. It's probably what most people are looking for. We commend your use of thumbnails and splitting some of the larger images, like on your index page, for faster load. We would suggest using a package such as CompuPic (get the trial version from download.com) for faster and larger gallery creation - post it all. Here's a simple example of what can be done, it's not perfect but it will give you an idea - everything you see was automatically generated.

Overall a great site that does 'exactly what it says on the tin'.

http://www.gippsland.net

A pretty reasonable offering from Gippsland.net. Navigation and audience are clearly defined. Design works well and there seems to be good deep content on the site.

We generally advise against using frames. We didn't like the fact that they have disabled right click, it is a very anti-web thing to do and rather small minded. There's nothing here particularly unique and we believe all sites should help other web masters learn by allowing access. That said, we looked at the html code anyway, we think the meta tags or title and description should be more descriptive. We did find that on smaller screen resolutions the content could not be read, this can eliminate some of your potential audience. With the advent of WebTV, PDA surfing etc you have to consider more than just PC screen sizes if your site is to be successful. In summary a pretty effective site.

http://www.geocities.com/bridgemusicuk

A really great site, nice original designed, sympathetic colour scheme and graphical treatment. This site cried out for silver (and maybe even gold - which we didn't award because a site like this really needs a message board for fans to chat on and generally more interaction). Depending on the success of the band, Lucy (the web mistress) could be on to a winning site here. We wish her every success and hope she'll resubmit as the site develops. The only other thing we'd say is that the page title meta tag could be more descriptive - it'll help in the search results.

Bronze

Coarse fishing in South Wales

Very basic design, a good first attempt with a clear audience and easy navigation. Some spelling problems. But essentially some real promise for future development.

family safe site

It's a bit mixed up but has so much content and clearly a lot of effort in it's production. It strikes us as a site that has grown organically (as the best always do) and now needs a major redesign to improve the navigation and get surfers to the content quickly. The music really has to go though ;-) See below.

http://www.aquaface.de.vu

Once we'd gotten over Martin designing his pages with FrontPage ;-) The site is well planned with easy navigation. It's all in German so we can't really comment on the content. It does appear that the screen size of the site needs to be quite large otherwise the central content pane becomes too squashed and this could limit the number of people who can use it effectively. Music on a site is generally a bad idea, even if like this site it's actually not too offensive, because after about a minute it begins to annoy the viewer and as a site designer you want people to stay on your site as long as possible. If you must have music perhaps only 10 seconds and don't loop it. Overall a good site, with easy navigation and well structured content.

http://www.geocities.com/amazon_village/

Clear navigation and a reasonable amount of content - if Zena is your thing ;-) Design wise pretty straight forward. We just hope you're ok on copyright posting the images. There's probably a lot we could say to help improve the site but here's a few points to help.

Firstly the index.htm file is very graphically intensive with little content or indication of content. This could mean that people won't wait for the image to load and because there is no text to explain why they should (which loads faster) they probably won't. We'd also suggest making it clearer how to enter the site - currently the entrance could be over looked.

Because you're with geocities (for hosting) you have to consider their pop-up windows and these do obscure some of your menu until closed - move the navigation links down a bit.

Finally with the images although nice - they are very big and again will take long time to download on 28k modems. We'd suggest getting a copy of CompuPic from download.com this programme will automatically (amongst other useful features) create a thumbnail gallery. This will be much faster to navigate and load than the current text links to large files. Here's a simple example of what can be done, it's not perfect but it will give you an idea - everything you see was automatically generated.

L. Martine Photography

Any site about photography / images has a tough time because you need to display images yet images are the slowest part of any site to download. So the award criteria for a such a site will to a large extent depend on how the images are treated in site design. With this site the whole first screen in an image - we think this is a mistake - it means even on 56k modems the page takes several seconds to download. Far more effective would be to present this front page as an html table and cut the images down into smaller files. This way the smaller images would load much faster. The concern is (as above) people won't wait. Meta tags could also do with a brush-up if you want people to find the site, include your geographical location for example. People often search by it - 'Photography Sydney Oz' for example.

The layout/design of the site was actually quite good but perhaps just let down by the implementation of images.

troop155scouting

This site is very basic in it's design, but Jacob has used considerable effort to find effective clip art and features such as a guest book. His objective and audience for the site is clear and well defined. We think this should become an effective community site. In terms of improvements there are no meta tag's so many search engines won't list him and navigation could be clearer - consider links at the top and bottom of the page.

http://links4yu.homestead.com

Possibly the biggest home site we've seen. Clearly an organic growth of ideas and interests which we'll expect to go on growing. It has content and links on a wide variety of topic which does mean it lacks a little in the 'clearly identified audience' and 'focus' stakes. We've given this site bronze because it lacks a little polish in presentation, the home page is extremely text heavy (covering a variety of topics) which could make visitors click-on instead of digging further. The meta tags could also do with a bit more effort.

http://nyhagen.hem.netlink.se/

We liked this site which is all about golden retrievers (dogs). The audience is clear and the design and navigation work very well. We particularly liked the simple paw print motif used throughout the site to link the content. The content itself was detailed and thorough. We wonder if by making the page title and description meta tags more descriptive of the actual content the site might get more traffic. We also found the flash intro rather pointless (sorry) it just gets in the way of the content. You need to get surfers into the content and browsing fast, you could loose them with the intro. Also the next page in has a large (40k) image which could delay download times, we'd suggest seeing if this image could be further compressed or resized so that it loads faster.

[note added 10/08/01: recent research on @omic has shown us that only 13.56% of visitors to @omic have the flash plug-in so with this in mind we'll be dropping our own small flash intro pretty quickly - as in, it's gone now]

Everyone should read this.

This is something which probably should be said to almost every site on this page to. Get your web stats implemented. A free service like http://www.webtrendslive.com is invaluable and we discuss how you can use it in more detail in our traffic analysis section. These stats will show you that actually most of your traffic may not be entering your site the way you planned it to. Maybe this is a human / web thing. We build sites a certain way and assume everything is working as we planned it to. Unfortunately the web and search engines are a whole new board game and the surfing public will enter where they want. Understanding these surfing behaviours can help you develop your site to better suit what surfers are looking for. Using this site as an example you might find that surfers are entering the site for free images of the dogs and by building this area further you will get more traffic.

To give you an example of how the unexpected happens, on our Internet Marketing page we used an example of how to build effective meta tags to get traffic from search engines. We used the example of a page about Monty Python (weird British comedy) that page now get ranked third on Google for searches of 'film releases monty phython'. So the moral of our story is get your stats and use them.

http://anti-spinnen.wolweb.nl

This site is, Louise tells us, a site to help her with her phobia of spiders - we certainly hope it helps. Posting it to the 'web' must have been scary enough.

• There's some really strong design ideas on this site, a good use of sound for atmosphere on the first page (one of the few we've seen - although sound should be dropped elsewhere as advised here).
• The site content isn't in English which means unfortunately we can't really comment on it's depth or appeal.
• Louise seems to have disabled the right click on her site which is a common trick but actually we couldn't see why she would want to do that. Surely there is nothing here particularly new, and sharing ideas is very much the mantra of the web - bad mark from us for that.
• She has also used frames for her site. We generally advise against this because it can mean you won't get listed as effectively on search sites and will also have to deal with people linking into the content page without seeing the navigation (which is reasonably easily overcome but has to be done). Using tables is much more effective and with html programmes like Dreamweaver updating is easy using library assets or site wide find and replace.
• We found that after the first page the navigation in particular loaded very slowly first time when tested on 56k connection. Because right click was disabled we couldn't check the size of the button images but our feeling is they are too big. Menu items like this shouldn't be bigger than 1 possibly 2k each.
• Meta tags? There aren't any - which means people searching the web will have problems finding your site even if it's the best site out there. There was also not much text explaining some of the images etc. this will again reduce your chances of being indexed effectively by search engines.
• Overall a good effort, and a worthy winner who we'll expect to go on to great things - maybe even cure that phobia.

http://f_a_g2001.tripod.com

Strong navigation and sympathetic design but... as we've said before:-

• drop the music
• avoid frames they're not good for search engines
• try and use one font or font family is site designs (here there is times and arial which shouldn't be combined).
• site seemed to load slowly and we suspect the music was the problem - too large a file size.
• meta tags need improving there are no keywords - these are so important if you want people to find your site.
• On the audience front, you should consider who you're aiming this site at. 'People who want to come and have fun on my site' is probably too broad. I'll refer you to the sites above on dogs or spiders both have a clear theme/audience and are therefore more likely to become successful sites.

Keep up the good work we're sure you'll get there.

http://www.ronjonesrealty.com

Ron's built a pretty respectable site for his realty business. There's clear design, navigation and audience. Our concerns are however:-

• ditch the flash - only 13.56% of visitors to @omic have flash (which ain't many) so most people probably won't see your work of art - it take a long time to download (time when visitors may leave) and is a barrier between the visitor and the content never a good idea. A business site has to work much harder to concert the casual surfer into the signed and sealed customer. Everything on your site should be aimed at this.
• Ditch the dhtml - we love dhtml but the mouse trail just gets in the way and detracts form the content. You've got to ask your self with all technology what does this add to my site? Why will my visitors appreciate this? If the answer is they probably won't ditch it.
• Collages - this is the kind of implementation we suggested for another site above but here the image sizes are still to big. You're total collage on each page must be 50k at least. Again it comes back to the above, what does it add - we agree it adds something but you need to ensure images are as compressed as possible and support the content, here we fear they've become the content. The images generally on this site seem a little big there are many packages on the market which will help you compress your images effectively.
• Meta tags, wow. Um, perhaps too much? Your description tags look ok, your title could even survive a bit more text but your keywords? Not only have you put the keyword tags in twice but we 'think' you may have overkilled ;-) You're in danger of not getting listed because you have too many. Check this page for help with them.

http://kitty_witty.boltpages.com/kittywitty/index.html

This site is a first site for Laura and it's clear she's struggled up that learning curve we all have to go through. She has gone a bit over board on the animated gifs and backgrounds but that's probably what newly minted webmasters/mistresses tend to do. The navigation is clear, and the content original however wonder if it's a little lacking in direction. We'd suggest focusing the site on the poetry which we're sure will find an audience to appreciate it. And taking the poetry pages as an example we felt the graphics actually detracted from the words - good site design should use images to complement and enhance the content. We couldn't see any meta tags and if you want people to be able to find your site on search engines you will need these. Check this page for help with them.

Kerala- Jewel of South India

If you've never visited Kerala or it's northern neighbour Goa you just have to go, it's an absolutely amazing place. This site focuses on Kerala and it' surrounds. The content is rich and orginal and there is clear audience for this sort of information on the area. We'd also suggest that there would be a ready audience for information about guest houses, rooms to let etc because many of us westerners like to stay out for longer periods than the 'package holidays' allow and finding decent places to stay in advance can be a great help. You could probably list places for free and then take a cut of any bookings. Anyway on the down side there are no meta tags here so getting listed on the search engines won't be easy (check this page for help with them) and also the navigation although well placed is confusing and hard to read because you've put the text over images. You need to simplify that and look at further compressing some of your main images. A good site well done.

http://www.geoland.cjb.net/

We couldn't read anything of the content of this site because we think it's written in Spanish. At first we thought the first screen was the site because it all laid out so well in one screen and then we scrolled down. Having everything coded on one page is a mistake as it makes the whole page longer in loading. We suggesting splitting the pages. Not much more we can say other than read this.

http://www.angelfire.com/home/myclub/

Pretty basic site, main navigation could be clearer, meta tags are weak (there's only a title tag and it's not really descriptive). Having a fixed background makes the text harder to read and generally the images seem to large and take too long to load. It also has music ;-( Not much more we can say other than read this.

http://www.nc-outerbanks.com/

An amazingly content rich web site with a very clear audience. It was let down by it's home made feel (which can be a good thing), for us it just lacked polish. Things like the main navigation menu's has 'sub menu' visible for each when clearly these examples should have been removed before publishing. Unfortunately we can't really tell you how to fix it, that's really with you, but looking at some of the silver and gold winners here should give you some ideas or looking at our winning web page guide. Clearly it's a site where the content has grown fast and the site is bursting at the seams trying to keep it all in ;-) Meta tags could do with more keywords also. But a great effort keep it up.