Step : The End, Awards started off slowly
As you might guess from the fact that there are so many awards, they’re not quite as meaningful as they used to be. Reams of meaningless awards can be bought for the price of a few e-mails. Some sites will give you awards simply if you link to them. You probably want to avoid these; they don’t do you or your site a lot of good.
On the other hand, there are some great awards that can have a big effect on traffic. We’ll point you to some good ones, and, if you really want to learn about every available award, we’ll give you some links to those too.
Submitting Your Site
The most popular awards get lots of nominations. You want your nomination to stand out even
before an editor looks at your site. Keep these rules in mind when nominating your site for an award:
1. Abide by the guidelines for submitting your nomination. If they want a 50-word essay in purple text, give them a 50-word essay in purple text. And don’t nominate your site for an inappropriate award—your consumer-protection cat-litter site will not be served by winning a “Cool Dog Site” award, and you’ll waste everyone’s time by nominating it.
2. Create a precise description of the site that you can send with your nomination. Make sure it’s free of spelling and grammar errors.
3. Double-check, triple-check, quadruple-check the URL you submit! You don’t want it to be incorrect.
4. If your site requires anything for optimum usage (like RealPlayer, Shockwave, and so on.) make sure the editors know about it. (You don’t want them to visit and then leave because they don’t have the right software to make the most of it.).
Really Good Awards
Might as well start at the beginning. Let’s look at some particularly useful awards.
- Project Cool, http://www.projectcool.com/sightings/ is a great award, but it’s not for sissies. Make sure you’re good, and darn good, before you submit here (and if you have a pornographic site, a site glorifying crime, or a site that’s just a link list—don’t bother). Project Cool judges sites on the basis of content, use of the Web as a medium, and well-thought-out navigation. Once you’ve submitted your Web site, explore the rest of the Project Cool site. You’ll find some great resources for site developers and a community for people who build Web sites.
- USA Today Hot Sites, http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/ch.htm are won by a wide variety of sites—new search engines, educational resources, media, or whatever; but they all have a lot of great content, and more than occasionally a good sense of humor. The USA Today technology editor chooses the sites on the basis of content and appearance, sites that “push the envelope,” and etc. If you do win a USA Today Hot Site award, your site has a chance to be listed in the offline, print version of USA Today—another great perk, probably more valuable than the Hot Site award itself. Regularly reading the USA Today Hot Site Awards gives you a good feel for what’s out there and can point you to some sites that are making great use of online technologies.
- Yahoo Picks of the Week, http://www.yahoo.com/picks/. When Yahoo really likes a site, it puts a pair of sunglasses next to it in the directory. It also lists its favorite sites in the “Pick of the Day.” There is an e-mail address at the bottom of that page, so you can suggest your site as a Yahoo pick. Get mentioned in Yahoo! What’s New, and the number of visitors to your site could skyrocket.
- Netguide’s Internet Sites of the Day, http://www.netguide.com/. Each of NetGuide’s various subject guides has a Site of the Day. Go into each guide and look for an e-mail link to submit your site. These are the guide subjects: Computing, Entertainment, Health, Internet, Living, Money, News, Shopping, Sports, Travel, Women, and so on. If you’re really lucky, eventually you may end up in the overall Net Guide.
Lesser-Known Awards
There are literally hundreds of Web-site awards, and it would take another couple of books to list them all. Unfortunately, a lot of them aren’t worth the electrons on which they’re printed. Anybody can make a little banner for an award, but that doesn’t make it useful! Furthermore, an award that’s impressive to your target audience—that Yak Stalking Site of the Day award, perhaps—is meaningless to a different group of users.
You’re going to have to judge a lot of awards for yourself. Some are not going to do you any good, yet some specialized awards may turn out to be well worth having. There are a couple of enormous directories you can use to check out what’s available:
- Awards Emporium, Awards Sites, and Website Awards.
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