Although the company blog has been shortlisted for a Golden Spider this year I will not be attending the event.
Why?
Put simply the event’s organisers appear to have serious communication issues.
To start with we had to be told by a third party that we’d actually made the shortlist.
Seemingly they contacted some of those shortlisted, but not all of them.
Why?
God only knows.
Then I got an email from one of their staff to my personal email address asking me if I would be attending or not. (We’re shortlisted for the company blog – not one of my personal ones)
At the same time a different member of their staff was in contact with our offices to offer us a ticket for the night. They then followed up shortly afterwards to say that they had two tickets for us.
Cool!
So I then proceeded to organise a “date” for the evening, letting them know that yes we’d go but that we’d confirm the second person’s name after the weekend. (Fortunately I hadn’t booked hotel rooms etc., at this stage – being a bit disorganised can pay dividends at times!)
So I’m beginning to feel vaguely warm fuzzy feelings towards Golden Spiders at this stage (I’ve criticised them quite a bit in the past)
With me so far?
It’s not particularly complicated.
So when we contacted them to confirm everything today they did an “about turn” and now say that there’s only one ticket and there had been a mistake.
I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough.
You don’t invite people to an event and then uninvite them a couple of days later.
Maybe they screwed up, but they should standover the screw up.
There is no way I am going to bother wasting my time attending an event that is that badly organised.
No way.
Do you still have to pay to have a website nominated?
I entered a site of mine into the Golden Spiders a few years ago. It wasn’t shortlisted. No big deal – despite the appalling quality of sites that were shortlisted. I asked the GS if they could provide score cards once the awards were over so I could see how my nomination got on. I felt I was entitled to this as I had PAID FOR my site to be nominated. I was told that this wouldn’t be a problem. They then refused to provide me with score cards after the ceremony when I rang up and requested them!
As far as I’m concerned, they stole my money. You can’t have a paid-for award ceremony with absolutely zero transparency. I think it would be prudent for real Web professionals to advise their clients to boycott this sham as their sites won’t be judged on merit. More on how many tables they book for the event or how much they advertise in Business and Finance magazine.
John
Most of the categories are “pay to enter”, but there are a number of categories, such as “best blog” which are free to enter
Michele
Ken
If you remember the entire standards debacle surrounding the GS a couple of years ago… (think Red Cardinal and threads on IWF etc., ) I actually spoke to them at the event, as I was there as a guest of one of the sponsors. They told both myself and Richard Hearne that they’d be in touch to see about how they could attempt to align the commercial aspects of it with standards etc., etc., but I never heard anything more about it.
Michele
The gs awards suck big time, if im not mistaken an award was presented on one occasion to a site direct from a template monster template.
Derek
That wouldn’t surprise me.
Having said that, a lot of the winners in recent years have been damn fine sites.
Michele
Hi Michele,prob quite true, but still off putting, im not a big golden spider fan.
While Ken said above about having it it tied in to standards {im assuming w3c}i wouldnt agree with that, pages with a few errors can work just fine, makes no real seo different and are quite browser /os friendly if designed right table driven ,css etc.
I would have to say that his point on the scoring transparency for paid awards is on the money and another quite off putting reason for why i would not waste my money.
Im sure im not the only one who see’s little value in the gs awards.
Derek
Derek
I wouldn’t advocate W3C standards as a way of judging sites at all. Well, certainly not as the most heavily weighed criteria. Running a site through the W3C validator is a bit of a brute force way of doing it and, as you said, a site that validates perfectly might be complete inaccessible and built using very poor practices.
There are plenty of other criteria aside from proper mark-up including accessibility, usability, creative design, usefullness and innovation, etc. that would all go towards the final mark. The Golden Spiders already have set list of criteria. I don’t think it’s too much to ask them to provide score cards to see how the PAID FOR nominations are being judged. The inability of GS to provide this is an indictment of the entire awards IMO.
totally agree Ken, the proper criteria as you said above is what a site should be judged on.
If there was no issue on there side with the scoring you would have seen yours when you asked those many years again.
Derek
I can’t believe that anybody would object to W3C standards being one of the criteria for judging. If all sites managed to attain standards then we would be at least into CSS3 by now. Badly coded sites slow down the development of the web.
I wouldn’t buy a car that meets ‘most standards’ or ‘some standards’. Why should I expect clients to put up with substandard work. Sure there are other criteria. Maybe some of them are more important. But that kind of dismissive attitude to good coding practice makes my blood boil. I see it in lots of web developers. What the client doesn’t know won’t hurt them seems to be the attitude. That sucks. That’s like the mechanic who sells you a car with a faulty fuel line that kinda works most of the time. To my mind people who disregard web standards only do so for two reasons. 1. Ignorance – they don’t know how to do it any better (that ones excusable if you’re a beginner). 2. Because they can get away with it. That’s inexcusable. It brings all web developers into disrepute!
“I can’t believe that anybody would object to W3C standards being one of the criteria for judging.” – I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that. In my opinion, at least a basic understanding of standards-compliant, semantic, well structured code should be a pre-requisite for any site to make it to the shortlist. I think it should be automatic assumption and not necessarily one of the criteria. Let’s face it, if web awards were all about evaluating mark-up and QA they wouldn’t be much fun. 🙂
You would think that it would be a pre-requisite Ken, but this was the first year where standards were even checked. The horrible truth of web standards in Ireland is that they need to be checked! There are far too many companies churning out rubbish and in the past they have been recognised by the awards despite their flagrant disregard for any standards.
There are also companies in Ireland doing a great job, making really good sites that are 100% compliant and they should get recognition for both design/content and compliant construction.
Quite apart from anything else, should somebody else ever have to work on a site it would be nice if it was all well commented and properly constructed. It’s just good practice. I say name and shame the companies too lazy to check their code. Clients are becoming more aware. Sloppy work gives all Web Devs a bad name. Still, I’ve got work out of other peoples bad work, and I’m only a beginner.
The awards should be about innovation/design/pushing boundries. But the basics should not be forgotten. Hat off to Prosperity for the Pink site by the way. That was a bold move! Don’t like it much but love the attitude.
I definitely agree with you in principal, Ian. However, having spent over 10 years developing websites in what is a lemon industry, I can tell you that most clients, sadly, wouldn’t know the difference between quality code and a pile of old drivvel full of font tags, nested tables and spacer gif’s. I’m not saying that exonerates us from being responsible developers, just don’t expect it to give you a competitive edge.
The only thing that’s going to really blow the lid off lazy Web development in Ireland is if the government introduce some very strict policies regarding website accessibility. A few high profile court cases would probably uncover the cowboys in this industry pretty quickly and create demand for a more professional level of service from Web agencies. Although you’ve a better chance of watching Elvis running down the wing at Old Trafford than you do seeing the government taking a proactive approach towards something like accessibility.