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It's that time of the year again.

Web awards season is now open.

So what do we have this year?

Well if you're into commercially run awards ceremonies that require an entrance fee for nominations AND attendance, then there's the Golden Spiders. I've said enough about them in the past, so I won't bother wasting energy on them this year. Suffice to say that charging 150 euro for a nomination and another 290 per seat at an event that is sponsored is sickening.

At the opposite extreme Damien Mulley has launched The Irish Web Awards
Unlike the Golden Spiders you don't have to pay to nominate someone and the tickets for the event are a nominal 30 euro a pop. nor do you have to pay to attend. Yes - there are sponsors, but they're the ones covering the costs. Imagine that!

And then, somewhere in between, lie the IIA Net Visionary Awards. It's free to nominate people, but you have to pay to attend.

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We've just revamped the VPS hosting site to make the order process a bit simpler.

We know it doesn't display properly in Safari, but this will be fixed.

I've mentioned the horrific salesonline.ie site a couple of times in the past.

They've now taken the site offline and are instead displaying a holder page with their contact details.

At least they're not making us all suffer through that video anymore!

So anyone want to take bets on whether their new site will actually comply with any web standards?

It's that time of year again...

Over the next few days you can expect your inbox to be bombarded with tasteful, tasteless, tacky and slick Christmas greetings.

I've had a few already, but so far there's been no sign of Gaddo's traditional Christmas card (he's infamous for them!)

Dancing elves seem to be popular this year..

And of course there's always the retouching of websites to give them that seasonal flavour...

James from Forbairt Media redid the Irish Webmaster logo to give it a gentle Christmas feel

Of course others have done more and less ... There's a discussion over on the site about what people have been doing

For a number of reasons I had to look at the SalesOnline.ie site today. I would have thought they'd have got round to fixing its basic brokenness, but I was wrong.

If you try to view that site in any browser you will suffer.

Why?

Basic HTML code hasn't been used.

How hard can it be to specify which version of (X)HTML you're using?

If the "designer" had even picked up a book on HTML for beginners they'd have learnt about the basic elements of a properly formatted SGML document using HTML markup.

To save repetition the concept is simple. If you open a "tag", which is a bit of code to describe how something should be rendered on the screen by your browser, then you should close it. In XHTML that "should" becomes "must".

Any (x)html document will have a number of elements:
HEAD - the top of the document. This can tell you what the document is about and how to treat it ie. is it html 4.* or xhtml 1.*. You can also include lots of other "meta" information
BODY - the main body of the text

Salesonline's site tries to break all these standards.

Neither the "header" nor the "body" tag is closed, so the browser has no way of knowing where the page ends.
They force you to load their video on their main page each and every time you visit - not exactly sane usage of multimedia

And yet they claim to be using "best in class technology". You'd think they'd be able to setup a proper website!

I started work on GuestHouses.ie before I headed off to LA. It's not going to change anyone's life, but hopefully it will grow into something worthwhile!
Andrew from RedMoonMedia did a nice header graphic for the site (link to go into footer on my todo list!), but I didn't get a chance to put that up until today. (Thanks to Peter for saving me on that one too!)

Golden Spider bashing might appear to be a national pastime, but I guess it's all down to the size of the target!

This year they've made a small effort to validate their weird choices by letting us, the public, vote on two of the categories. Of course, as Niall found out, the developers who did their site for them aren't exactly the most competent, as they didn't setup the forms to validate properly.

And what level of esteem should you hold web awards that include Template Monster templates?

There's threads on the "wonderful" awards on both CI and IWF. If you want some of the background then read over the thread from last year as well!

When is a link not a link?

When you can't actually click on it.

Someone started a thread over on CI the other day about NetVisionary nominee Panthius

The footer of the site contains a set of "links" which DO NOT work if you are using a normal browser:


It transpires that the links do work if you use Internet Explorer, which shows how "popular" a browser that is with Irish creative and web professionals!

Regardless of what browser I may or may not be using I'm amazed that someone managed to put together a business website so badly that the links don't work. That takes effort!