Okay, so you've taken plunge and created your awards program. Your criteria are defined and well written, your purpose is understood and you've promoted heck out of your program. Now you've started getting applications - and real work begins.This is part of awards programs that is, well, both interesting and extraordinarily dull. The creative work has all been done. What remains is to examine each site that applies for your award and determine if they are good enough to deserve to be recognized.
So how does this work? It's pretty simple, really. It all starts from your criteria.
Let's use an example of a pretty standard set of criteria:
- Reasonable download time - Understandable navigation - Readable text - Not under construction - No broken links - Good quality content - Way to turn off music - Good HTML - Viewable in all screen resolutions - Does not violate copyright or steal bandwidth - No sites which promote illegal activities, pornography, hacking or warez.
What I like to do is set aside a few hours a week to go through my list of sites. Then you visit each and every site and compare it to criteria that you have created for your award. You should also keep in mind whether sites must meet ALL criteria or just most of them!
This is so important that I will repeat it again: compare applying site against your criteria and only your criteria. In fact, you should only compare it against criteria that you had posted at time site was submitted.
So let's check a site against criteria. You surf to it and find that it seems to download very slowly. This, at first glance, appears to violate your criteria - but spend a couple more seconds to make a judgment call: is this result of site design or something beyond webmasters control (such as slow server)? If page has 500kb of graphics, then site flunks immediately - go on to next one. If page looks reasonable (and it will not take long to figure this out), then continue with it.
Okay, what's next on criteria? Understandable navigation. That's an easy one - can you figure out quickly how to navigate site? Hmm, suppose a site has a JavaScript menu and you hate JavaScript? well, if you used these criteria, then you cannot flunk site for this - but you can update your criteria so next series of submissions cannot have JavaScript menus. Readable text is next on list. Can you read text? It does not matter whether characters are pink and green - can you read them? If so, site passes - if not, it doesn't.