Golden Spiders Relaunch – Dialup Users Need Not Apply

The Golden Spiders site was relaunched today.

First off I have to say it looks a hell of a lot better than the last one. The last one was dire. The new site looks like someone actually went to the trouble of designing it.

So what do we look at? The site or the awards themselves?

Well, the site is the first thing that you are going to see if you are interested in any form of internet awards.

As I already said it looks a hell of a lot better than the last site (you could add in a “h” there and it wouldn’t make any difference), but it has flaws and by the bucket full.

I’m on a reasonably fast DSL line at home and a marginally faster wireless connection in the office.

In neither location does this site load quickly. Why?

There are a number of reasons which are worth examining.

Location: Ireland’s “premier” web awards site is hosted in the USA. This gives it a ping time of over 150 milliseconds on a DSL line. Considering Eircom are the headline sponsor you’d think the site would at least have been hosted in Ireland!
If you compare that to say The Net Visionary site, which gets a ping of about 24 milliseconds you can immediately see one issue.

When you combine that with the sheer amount of data that they have crammed into the page it gets quite scary.

The total page size is close to a massive one megabyte in size combined with a further 9 megs of video (which you can’t stop!).

Breaking that down further you find there are loads of images that weigh in at over 50k a piece. The header image is over 100k!

In some ways it’s a wonderful example of how NOT to do a website if you care about your bandwidth bills, your users patience or general website speed.

The Flash based video is very slick, but why oh why didn’t they include any basic controls? All you can do is mute the audio!

So what of the awards themselves?

Well this is the thing I’ve always taken issue with.

Of the 22 categories only two are free to enter – blogging and charity / community. All the rest require a 150 euro “administration” fee. Odd that, when you consider that other awards that have a commercial angle don’t feel any need to levy this kind of fee. While others yet again don’t have a commercial angle and somehow manage to run year on year without this kind of charge.

So what of the actual award criteria?

Picking a couple at random:

Best Web Design and Web Development Agency: Judges will be looking for the quality of service delivered to clients
in the areas of innovation, meeting requirements, delivery, ROI as well
as client and end-user satisfaction.

How are you meant to evaluate that? Work out a deal between your top clients and yourself so that they speak highly of you?
What about web standards, accessibility and all those factors that  make a real difference?

Or how about this one:
Best Blogging website: Judges will be looking for well written, well designed blogs which
exude the writer’s opinions and personality. They will also be judging
your blog in terms of its usefulness within a given sector and the
level of feedback on the blog from the readers themselves.

Most of the top Irish blogs aren’t even using custom designs and the message from the criteria is terribly mixed. Are they looking for business blogs? Personal blogs? Niche blogs?
It’s really not clear.

The judging panel this year is strong, but what they’ll be left judging is going to be the big question. If so many industry professionals take the awards seriously, how do they expect to get a reasonable cross-section of entrants?

Other people are as impressed as ever, if you’ll excuse the slight sarcasm:

• Red Cardinal
• Mulley
• Pete
• IWF – the thread that will not die!
• Pixel Apes
• Creative Ireland and again

Of course I will be going to the event, don’t get me wrong! I already got one invite, so I’ve marked it in my diary.