It's a good idea to attach graphic directly to email message, as well as to include a link where it can be picked up if, for some reason, image is not received properly.

I've found an email similar to below hits upon all of necessary points.

Hi Sally,

Thanks for applying for Excellent Site award. Your site has met criteria for award and has won! I found your site is indeed excellent and I thoroughly enjoyed my visit. I especially liked your page about Sammy (your dog) - it made me laugh. The photos of your children are a nice touch (cute kids) and your choice of background images is good.

Your award image is attached. Please link it back to http://www.internet-tips.net - this is not a requirement but it would be appreciated.

Some URLs which you may find useful: http://www.internet-tips.net/Winawards/Winanaward.htm

Description of our awards program in detail http://www.internet-tips.net/Winawards/excellent.htm

Excellent site award home page. http://www.internet-tips.net/Winawards/criteria.htm

The criteria common to all of our awards. http://www.internet-tips.net/images/sample01.gif

You may also pick up award image here if you wish.

One thing that I do NOT recommend is to inform your winners about any negatives or give them ay criticism. I know from personal experience that these kinds of comments detract from thrill of winning an award. I prefer to just tell my winners good news and leave it at that.

Some sites use a scoring system to figure out who has won award. In those instance, I would also recommend that this score NOT be shared with anyone - again, no need to take anything away from your winners victory.

That, in a nutshell, is a method which is useful for handling your winners.

If you are being hosted on one of many commercial or free sites, it's certain that they have a statistics package of one sort or another available.

But perhaps you're wondering why you need this data? What's it really for? Well, let's say you have written a site to sell stamps. You have four pages to site. You look at hit counter and see 400 people visited it yesterday, but only 3 of them bothered to visit your page to see what they could purchase. In addition, you also see that there were no visitors from yahoo.com and only a few from other search engines.

Now you have some things that you can do. You can come up with a better design to get your users to page where they purchase stamps. You can see if your site is listed with yahoo.com and if not, fix it. And you can check rankings with other search engines and fix what's going on there.

Another statistic might be monitor size. Let's say you designed your site for 1024X768 resolution. You look at your statistics and you find that 80% of visitors have 800X600 screens. Additionally, you see that there were few hits on inner pages on your site. In this case, you might conclude your visitors are being turned off because your site does not fit on their screen. A redesign might be appropriate.