• • • General Criteria and Rules • • •



Please, read these rules before application and make sure you comply with all of them.

• Your website must have an artistic design, with a personal touch. Having a typical corporate template will not necessarily make your site memorable... We seek originality and innovation.

• You have to be both webmaster and designer of the site you are submitting. Moreover, you must display your own content, unless you have created a site which is dedicated to any classical writer or artist, supposing you have gained the copyright permission to display this material. In that case, we would expect your personal comments or point of view, and not just a reproduction of someone else's work.

• As blatant as it will sound - your site has to be appealing to the eye. Beauty is, of course, a matter of taste, but there are some basic standards such as - no pixelated graphics (read how how to avoid pxelation in our tutorials), no clutching colours, good contrast between the background and the text, easy to read fonts (read our tutorial about the correct use of fonts), as well as pleasant and consistent theme throughout the site. Excess of blinking images and Java effects can easily disturb and annoy the visitor.

• We want to see correct use of the "white space" (empty space), no large, unused areas, but at the same time -- no overfilled and busy areas. Everything should be balanced and used in a good proportion.

• Additionally to design, this award program is seeking to recognize those who promote higher values on the Internet. From stand-alone Awards Programs we would expect to see a comprehensive criteria, preferably with freely offered tutorials, which will potentially improve the webmaster's skills and standards. Profit oriented websites can as well indirectly promote higher values by offering interesting and useful articles, reasons to improve web standard, etc.

• Advertising on the pages of personal websites will not be seen in a friendly eye. However, sites hosted on free servers will qualify despite the ads, which their server displays, assuming they do not dominate the design. This also applies to commercial and profit oriented websites, which may have only small advertisements areas on their pages.

• Images and illustrations should be relevant to the content of the page. Other than been relevant, they must be original. Please reduce to the utmost minimum the use of standard icons, basic buttons and commonly used graphics, use of which, will never give your site the "personal touch" that we are looking for.

• When was your website last updated? Will we see a list of updates or at least a date when your pages were last revised? Please show us that the site is active and has been revised at least 2 months ago.


• • • Technical Criteria • • •

• Even though the main purpose of this award is design, we would want to see a high technical standard as well. You have to make sure that all images has alt tags and that your site has no visible coding errors, which show up on the page, however, we will also be checking your code for accuracy using online validations tool - WDG. Click on the link to test your site before applying. Also, you might find our technical tips useful.

• We hope not to find any broken links and images. All internal links should be coded properly and since they are a part of the site, open in same browser's window, while external links, should open in a new browser's window and show the visitor that they are not a piece of your website. Depending on the size of your website, we would accept up to 2 broken external links.

• High technical standard and clean code generally excludes excessive use of Java scripts and miscellaneous effects, especially those that crash the surfers browser. If you use scripts and alphabets, make sure they all work properly and do not prevent your website from been compatible with the latest versions of IE, Netscape and Firefox and Opera.

• Your pages must load reasonably fast even on dial-up connection. Remember that above 3 Java Scripts, excess of tables and huge, not optimized graphics will prevent your site from loading quickly.


• • • Navigation Criteria • • •

• If you use based-on-Java or flash navigation menu, you need to provide an alternative way of navigation, either "bare bone HTML" or Site Map for those who has no Java or Flash installed. Site Maps, generated by Google, are not accepted.

• "Back to top" option / button on long pages. But, together with it, we would not want to see terribly long pages, it's always better to have few reasonably short pages, and not one long, as the visitor loses track with the text on over-leighty pages.

• And finally... if you use music to enhance the visitor's experience, there should be an easy way to turn it off on every page. Even the most pleasant melodies are not necessarily to everyone's taste, and we wouldn't want to be forcefully disturbed while surfing your site.