Re: Awards and award attitude :(

Good response!

In my opinion, your description merits at least a monthly post.

The client that triggered my search for this info is one of those that can't
understand why it takes more than a couple of days to get listed in the
major search engines/directories.  (I sure seem to get winners lately!)

The search for information wasn't the heart of my post -- rather finding the
hype award sites on a few Web designers' home pages while looking for
information regarding some of these awards.

I can't think of anything to disagree with, except that I (as I probably
overstated) have been working with people with disabilities, and to watch a
person with severe cerebral palsy struggle to hit the "tab" key 15 times to
get through the series of links at the top of a page to get to the "heart"
of the content of a web site almost brings tears to my eyes.

Just using the theory of "Bobby Approved" doesn't mean you have an
accessible site, just as mis-using a style sheet for dramatic effects will
still pass the css validation.  I also don't believe that your (us as
authors) HTML code has to be perfect in all aspects of validation (at any
level of HTML), but by running our sites through these validation
"machines", we can sometimes get a better idea of how our "tricks" could
fail.

I would rather get refused for these awards and have my clients/customers
watch this person attempt to navigate their site.  Actually, I would rather
have the 3 award presentation sites (mentioned in previous post) watch this
person navigate their award winning sites!  Especially the
"disabilitynetwork.com" site.

It is one thing to have the "design for the majority" attitude and then
actually work with the people (some of which are quite wealthy) that can't
get through the assumptions that we as web designers make.

The disabled person I have just mentioned, by the way, shows great promise
in becoming a good web designer.  If I can only get him away from using
browser specific toys!  :)

paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Tom Polk <jtpolk(at)texas.net>
To: hwg-basics(at)mail.hwg.org <hwg-basics(at)mail.hwg.org>
Date: Sunday, September 26, 1999 2:09 AM
Subject: Re: Awards and award attitude :(


>No, you don't need an award winning site. You need to have a good site,
>and a bit more, but the awards are pure hockum and snake oil (in terms
>of the awards getting one easy listing on something like Yahoo. Ok, I'll
>share the guidelines I use when submitting to Yahoo and other human
>reviewed directories.

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