A web designer & developer's blog

While all this awardery still makes me quite happy and while it’s reassuring to see that I’m well on a level that’s internationally competitive, it really reminded me of the olden days… like ten years ago, when frames and tables were the standard means for webdesigners and no one cared about Google, because Google didn’t exist!

There weren’t many web designers at that time and you’d repeatedly stumble upon websites praising the awards they got. Gold Award in Something or some Special Platinum Award of Whatever. Large rectangular JPEGs with golden typo, praising the winner’s achievement. Of course none of those had any relevance at all, especially not at that time – it was just some people like you and me, giving out awards as a means to generate traffic for themselves.

Things aren’t necessarily like that anymore. There’s a lot of stuff to gather and all of it carries some worth and prestige, but the importance of an award is obviously based on the amount of people knowing about it and in the internet that’s easy to measure: by the amount of visitors they have and consequently the amount of traffic they generate.

Now that I’ve more or less collected all of the smaller awards, excluding TheFWA (my heart is bleeding) and the CSS awards, here’s a short overview. The means was Google Analytics, measuring the first 10 days after the award was received to get the peak as well as following traffic.

1. DesignCharts: 82%
2. Design Licks: 8%
3. Dope Awards: 5%
4. Irie.be: 3%
5. BestWebDesignAward: 2%

Most interesting is that DesignCharts generated most of the visits. Their algorithm is supposed be based on the traffic of their affiliate network, but in my case it seems to be based on Design Licks alone, because that was the only site I’ve been featured on, at that time – which amounted to a mere tenth of what came from the DesignCharts afterwards. Funny.