Tag Archives: website design awards

With the Webby Awards Deadline Looming, We Tip Our Hats to Top Web Designs

responsive web design, Small Business Marketing, Web Design, , ,

Webby AwardsThe entry deadline for the next Webby Awards is Nov. 1, and next spring’s ceremony marks the 18th year in a row since the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences organized the event to recognize achievement in Web design and Internet excellence. The Webbies represent one of several major events celebrating top web designs, including the CSSDA, the Interactive Media Awards and the WebAwards, among others. Studying the winners of such awards is a great way for designers to learn secrets of the field.

Winning Criteria

What makes for good Web design in today’s mobile-oriented environment? Awwwards.com, which gives top Web designers recognition and prestige, identifies 10 trends in contemporary Web design. These include:

  • Putting content first
  • Simplifying design interaction and content
  • Centering on user experience
  • Providing app-style interfaces
  • Unifying desktop and mobile appearance.

Ultimately, any design is only as good as its functional delivery. If customers find designs too slow to load, their visual value will be lost. Choosing a fast hosting provider using resources at www.InternetProviders.com can help ensure site visitors appreciate your aesthetic efforts.

Winning Web Designs

This September, digital advertising agency LIQWID won the Web Marketing Association’s 2013 WebAward for Best Advertising Website. This marks the fourth major recognition LIQWID has received over the past year, making its site a design model to pay attention to.

LIQWID offers advertisers a solution to the challenge of responsive Web design. Where design once centered around desktop displays with fixed width in Internet Explorer and Firefox, today’s mobile orientation means design must display across screen sizes ranging from smartphones to HDTVs as well as a diverse collection of operating systems and browsers.

For ad designers, this poses the problem of how to make the same ad display equally well in different venues. LIQWID solves this problem by using fluid Web design principles to create ads that automatically collect information from the displaying device for instant resizing to any size, resolution or screen location. This enables the same ad to look just as good on a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

Appealing Apps

Each year, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference hosts the Apple Design Awards to recognize apps that further design, technology and innovation. One of this year’s winners was the Yahoo Weather app for iPhones and iPads, which provides a great case study for blending aesthetic appeal with functionality.

Apple strives to combine beauty with simplicity, and the tech giant praised the Yahoo Weather app for embodying this ideal. The app provides a high-quality background photo based on the geographical location of the place the user is querying about. This combines with elegant foreground typography, which supplies the relevant functional information, including place, time, current temperature and sky conditions and forecasting outlook. Compare the result with the generic ugliness of many weather sites, and you’ll see why Apple recognized this app for its visual achievement.

By Peter Marino, Owner and CDO of the SEO & Inbound Marketing company reelWebDesign.com.

Last updated by at .