[thelist] Award Winning Site???

[martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com]

Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Hi Jay

For all sites other than purely personal projects, the key
indicator has to be "How well does the site help its users to
fulfil whatever they've come to the site to do?"

For consumer sites, the site will have to work cross platform
and crossbrowser. It needn't be all singing and all dancing,
but the core functionality *has* to work.

For business sites, unless you're 100% certain that the user
base is standardised without exception on a single platform
and browser (which usually means an extranet), it has to
work cross platform and browser to the criterion above.
This matters because business users are fewer and more
valuable, so have a bigger individual impact if you upset them.

For business, consumer and intranet, the site *has* to be
accessible to the criterion above. In some situations, this is
also a legal requirement.

Without exception, usability has to be a core value, right up
there with how accurately the logo is used (or whatever the
other presentational values are).

Low usability = few users in your target audience = a failed site.

The other indicator is of course "How good are the things which
the site attempts to provide". This is why
http://www.delivermytoothpaste.com
http://www.firefittednasally.com
http://www.ijusthadarectalexamonline.com
and a lot of the other dotflops flopped.

Kevin Costner was wrong - if you build it, they might not come.

Cheers
Martin




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Subject:  Re:[thelist] Award Winning Site???


 >How on earth are such awards judged? Surely not by the standards that web
 >designers on this list would use?


I was just thinking about this the other day as well Richard. What
constitutes an award winning web site?

Does it depend on the audience? (A B2B web site has different criteria than
an entertainment site)
Does it depend on technology? (This site created with cutting edge
JavaPERLVector.Net# Beta1.08  with some Flash thrown in.)
Are there required elements? (Similar to figure skating and gymnastics, but
without the injuries.)
Are there things that never should be done? (And is JAVA one of them?)
There are 10's of more questions that could be asked here. And I would be
curious to see the what kind of criteria list Evolters could come up with
because I would like to build what could be considered to be an award
winning web site....wouldn't we all?



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