CREATE YOUR OWN AWARD PROGRAM

After applying for awards for your own website, have you decided to embark on creating your very own award progam and don't know where to start? Well, let's start at the very beginning... Creating a worthwhile award program takes alot of time and commitment, from the initial design to the continual process of evaluations. Most importantly you must enjoy visiting sites and viewing a vast array of topics and themes. Before you start to create your program visit some award programs and study how they have been constructed and also what they offer. Ask yourself why you like one program more than another? Remember never to copy an award program! Now you must decide what type of sites you are going to review, e.g if you run a site about pets why not set up a program that reviews similar sites? Otherwise you may simply keep it to personal, commercial or both. Now for a name, try to keep it original and relate it to your site. If you want your award program to be taken seriously you must decide on the following points:

Purpose

What is your aim in offering your awards? Think about why you wanted to created your award program, be honest and original.

Award Graphics

Decide how many awards you are going to give, e.g gold, silver and bronze. You may wish to offer a special award for a certain theme. Try to keep your award graphic no greater than 200 x 200px in dimension. Make the design simple, uncluttered and clear. Also optomise your graphics to keep your file size small to ensure fast loading on a web page. I have designed some award graphic templates, which are free for non commercial use, please take a look. I can also help you with your own idea if you like.

Criteria

Decide what you like and don't like to see on a website. Some are standard issues such as family friendly sites. For each point that you decide try to explain what you mean. Cover design elements such as content, navigation etc. Also include disqualifiers, these are things that you definitely don't want to see when visiting the applicant's site. Again some standard issues apply such as adult content.

Scoring

Decide on how you will score the sites and explain how points will be gained and lost. Also decide how many points will be needed to win your gold and any other award tiers.

Process

Tell your applicant how long it will take to evaluate their site. How many visits you will make and what you will be reviewing on each visit. Explain who will be notified, everyone or just the winners. Will you also give advice on improvement and feedback to the applicants?

Evaluators

Will you be evaluating on your own or will you create a team? Creating a team of evaluators helps to give a more balanced opinion of a website, as everyone has their own personal tastes and opinions. Of course there is nothing wrong in evaluating by yourself many programs do, but you may find your program becoming popular and have many evaluations to do, having a team can cut the time. Also, list any experience that you may have relating to web design including qualifications.

Application Form

Decide what information you will need from the applicant, i.e name, email address, url and site description. Also you must provide an alternate email for people who use browsers without forms. You can get free forms from several places one popular resource is Bravenet.

Privacy Policy

Applicants need to know that their information is confidential, so you must state what you intend to do with their information.

Copyright Statement

Protect all of your hard work that you have put into designing your program. State what can be used and what can't. Give credit where credit is due, list all resources that you have used to create your site that don't belong to you along with links to their sites.

Code Of Ethics

Show that you have high standards by having a code of ethics. Also join an ethics program such as, Apex or Ethic Pleadge, they wil usually give you a statement that you can use on you ethics page.

Statistics/Status Page

Showing statistics is helpful to the applicant as they can see their chances of winning your award. Also if you give an id code to an applicant you can design a chart showing the codes so that they may track their progress.

Resources

A good award program always has a resources page. This is where you can list your favourite tools for web design, your aim is to help others to improve their sites so having this page is very important!

Winners Pages

You must devise a way in which you will present your winners. Try to do this in a pleasant manner giving laudations, dates, site descriptions and maybe also screen shots of their sites.

Now that you have created your program you may wish to to join some reputable organizations. Please check my memberships and ratings pages for links to ratings sites, ethics organizations and family safe programs that will help you make a respectable program. You can then create a ratings and membership page detailing your affiliations. Finally have fun! If you have read my tips and have used it to create your own fantastic award program please let me know as I would love to visit! - Jo