This post is inspired by the announcement of the Danish Internet Award 2006, sporting a 1999-style website complete with Flash intro and invalid markup (They do have a weblog, though).
I looked at the list of people from the grand jury and figured it’d be interesting to see if their companies “get it”. After all, there they are, trying to give out “danish internet awards”. Obviously these are people that has an excellent feel for what’s moving on the international scene in regards to Web 2.0, the web in general, syndication, blogging, folksonomies and what have we.
To make it fair, I only considered the websites of companies that should obviously have a clue, ie the web development agencies. For spice, I added a viral marketing agency to see how they’d stack up.
These are the contestants, whose websites I had to guess since the DIA website for some reason doesn’t care to link to them. But hey, it’s not like the DIA is about marketing on the web, so we’ll forgive them.
On each website I checked for the presence of a weblog and a newsfeed. I also checked how well their markup validated on the frontpage, and 2 subpages chosen as “About” and “References” (or whatever seemed closest on each site). Points were awarded like this:
| The website has a weblog: | 1 point |
| The website has a newsfeed: | 1 point |
| Each page without validation errors: | 1 point |
| Each page without validation warnings: | 1 point |
| Each page with more than 100 warnings: | -1 point |
| Company | Framfab | Magnetix | GoViral | Dwarf | Netpeople |
| Frontpage | 63 warnings | 13 warnings | 8 warnings | 3 errors, 17 warnings | 127 warnings |
| About page | 48 warnings | 9 warnings | 8 warnings | 12 warnings | 116 warnings |
| References page | 50 warnings | 9 warnings | 29 warnings | 10 warnings | 73 warnings |
| Has a weblog? | No | No | No | No | No |
| Has a feed? | No | No | No | No | No |
| Score | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
Wow… The website development business in Denmark must be in a bad state when 4 of the bigger agencies fail to produce valid markup. Also none of the contestants have a weblog or any way for me to keep up to date with their launches or business that doesn’t involve me giving out my email address (and not even all of them has this option).
Do remember that all those companies have representatives on the grand jury of Danish Internet Award 2006. How you can be expected to award a prize like that in 2006 when you have hardly entered the new millenia in terms of online marketing, presence, and technological skill is beyond me.
Congratulations Netpeople on having the lowest score of the bunch. With a website featuring popup windows, javascript-only navigation, terrible tagsoup-markup, frames, and itsy pixelized text whose size cannot be changed, you have earned that spot.
But don’t linger on your laurels, you were not that far away from the rest…
Your observation is only partly cool. It is fair to expect valid markup from the judging companies, and it can be somewhat fun to count warnings, if the audience knows the validation tool and the standards you have chosen to validate for.
Loading mentalized.net, the Javascript console of Firefox 1.5 returned 9 errors and above 90 warnings (some probably duplicates). It does not in any way cripple my experience of your site, and from that I can only guess that you probably focus more on content than technology (but I could be wrong). I does not enable me to draw conclusions about your abilities or the state of your business, and it will not withdraw from my positive view of your words. I say - if it renders consistently in the renderers the publisher wants it to render in, nothing is wrong for the target audience.
I cannot follow how you can go from invalid markup, missing blogs and feeds to “the website development business in Denmark must be in a bad state”. In my view, a missing blog is soooo much better than a blog for the sake of having a blog. I think you are wrong for disqualifying the judges for not “getting it”, if you’re simply measuring by the markup validity of their websites and their ability to produce a blog and a feed on their sites.
That said, standard valid markup is good. Blogs and feeds are good if used for a purpose. Their mere existence, however, does not qualify for anything.
Loading mentalized.net, the Javascript console of Firefox 1.5 returned 9 errors and above 90 warnings (some probably duplicates).
Wow, really? My JS console is quiet, but I haven’t upgraded to Firefox 1.5 yet. Sounds like I am in for a treat when I do.
And you’re right, I’m sure they’re all fine judges for the awards thing. After all the award isn’t about technical flair or usability or accessibility, but marketing, so they are supposed to judge online marketing campaigns, not websites. It does make me wish they had chosen a better name for the award.
Danish Online Marketing Campaign Award 2006 anyone? It even has a pronouncable acronym.
Prediction: Avistid.dk wins the Grand Prix for innovative and creative use of the Internet’s technical possibilities.
Hey J, The nine errors are just style rules you added underscore in front of. So relax. PS: Check out “Bedst på nettet” and “Bedst til nettet” instead. There mesurement standarts are more likly to fix yours. Holla if you wonna join me in my .Net adventure ;)
Hej Jakob,
Har du tjekket de personer der sidder i juryen? De er faktisk fede. Du kan f.eks. starte din research på juryformanden Lars Bastholms egen private blog bastholm.blogspot.com eller jurymedlems Balder Olriks - meget anderledes - www.netsummary.dk.
Ang. DIA06 er hele formålet sådan lidt fremme i skoene, imho. DIA 06 skal - hvis alt går godt - få endnu flere åbne, relevante, samtalende reklamer frem på scenen. Det er nemlig, stadig min egen mening, her det sner. Den gamle reklame der partout ville implantere et købsbudskab i hovedet på en uskyldig forbruger er simplethen død. Et nyt paradigme, som jeg andetsteds har kaldt We Aid - a marketing paradigm for the usercentered era hersker.
Det her paradigme handler jo blandt andet om åbne, kollaborative, brugergenerede websites, corporate weblogs, syndikering af indhold og hvad ved jeg. Men noget af det virkeligt spændende, synes jeg, er at det nye paradigme ikke udrydder traditionel markedsføring, men ændrer den til det bedre. Flash-reklamer på nettet kan faktisk åbne sig op for (for)brugerne, give dem nye muligheder at lege med, som de kan tage til sig og engagere sig i hvís de vil - og lade ligge hvis de ikke vil. Det har jeg også skrevet lidt om. Læs mine Conversation is (inter-)action og Banner ads as conversational marketing: danish newpaper BT case
mvh
Jon Lund (direktør, FDIM, medarrangør af DIA 06)