Most Accessible Website Award
October 12, 2009 at 8:49 am
Last week was a brilliant one. It began with a win on Monday for an amount of money that I’d been waiting for since July 2008. Quite a hefty sum too, nice to receive it in time for me to hand it straight over to the Revenue.
On Wednesday, a new maternity hospital opened in Malawi. This was the result of five years of hard work on the part of The Rose Project. That Irish charity fundraised and built a maternity hospital to help a country that is on its knees with some basic healthcare. It’s definitely something that we Irish can be proud of as The Rose Project is a small charity set up and run by Irishwoman Mary Donohue. It’s not in the media everyday. But it works hard and does great things. The hospital was opened by another Irishwoman we can be proud of – Dr Mary Robinson.
To cap it all off, on Saturday night at the Irish Web Awards, The Rose Project website won the award for Most Accessible Website in Ireland. This is the second year in a row that a site by Brightspark has won such a prestigious and coveted award. We’re delighted that our work is being recognised by the judges of the Web Awards and really pleased too that it brings further coverage to The Rose Project. Congratulations to The Rose Project on the win.
It’s notable that out of 22 awards handed out on the night, 9 were won by what I would deem to be ’small’ organisations who obviously chose well in how to spend their limited budgets. The other 13 were won by well-funded organisations or semi-state bodies – the likes of The Irish Times, RTE, IDA. I’m delighted to see that publicly funded websites in Ireland have improved so much. At the same time, I’m really proud for the people behind the following sites who really are living the ethos of today – to get more with less:
- Best Site in Irish Language – Nos Magazine
- Best Social Media Campaign - Count Me Out
- Most Beautiful Website in Ireland – Organic Supermarket
- Best Ecommerce - Curious Wines
- Most Innovative – Decisions for Heroes
- Best New Web App – Kildare Street
- Best Music – Nialler9
- Best Videocaster – Look & Taste
- Best Podcaster – The Persuaders
With the global web awards, the Webby Awards early closing date of 30 October 2009, I would strongly urge all the winners and indeed the shortlisters at Saturday night’s awards to enter the Webby Awards. Put Ireland on the global web awards map. Enter here.
Tags: Irish Web Awards 2009, Most Accessible Website in Ireland, Webby Awards
Brightspark Shortlisted for Web Awards
September 24, 2009 at 10:48 am
Delighted to see we’ve been shortlisted three times for two categories in the 2009 Irish Web Awards:
- Most Beautiful Website in Ireland – for our work on The Rose Project
- Most Accessible Website in Ireland – for our work on The Ability Awards and for The Rose Project.
My thanks to the judges who have deemed us worthy of getting this far. We’re in great company so I’m pretty pleased to make it to the shortlist.
Winners will be announced on 10 October.
Tags: Irish Web Awards 2009, Most Accessible Website in Ireland, most beautiful website in ireland
A Win For Us At Irish Web Awards
October 13, 2008 at 11:32 am
It’s official! The Most Accessible Website in Ireland is Kanchi, a site created by Brightspark during the summer. I’m so glad it won for a number of reasons:
- Kanchi’s mission is to change the way society thinks about disability. So it’s only fitting that their site is the Most Accessible in Ireland.
- The site was also shortlisted for Most Beautiful Website in Ireland and that in itself says something. Accessibility and beauty do not normally go hand in hand, so am particularly pleased about this.
- A site like Kanchi would not have been picked up by the other two awards. Not for profits generally don’t have the spare cash to be able to afford entry into the Golden Spiders. And they are usually too busy doing good things to have the time to email everyone who knows them to ask for a vote in the IIA awards. The Irish Web Awards was set up to honour sites that are doing everything right; it means more to me to win this award because it’s validation by peers in the industry – who can be the toughest critics of all.
- This is Brightspark’s 3rd year in a row to be nominated for awards. I really wanted to win something and not have to do the smiling and clapping when someone else walked up to pick up the prize again!
Winning this award also gives validation to Brightspark’s business process. A couple of years ago, I introduced a new approach which has been working exceedingly well. Brightspark puts together teams for projects. When I meet a client and understand their vision, their style, and their budget, I go off and put together the very best team to deliver their job.
For Kanchi, this involved Ken Stanley on coding , Ray Doyle on design, Jess Kelly on video content, and me on copywriting and project management. The most perfect talent for the job works together for the duration of the project. When the project is delivered, it moves to a less costly maintenance team for updates. For clients it means they get access to the best talent in town at an all-in price. The teams get to work on what they do best on exciting projects. And I get to work with amazing individuals without buying into one design style or coding capability.
I’d like to thank IQ Content for sponsoring this award. I have the utmost respect for the work that they do, so again it was more validation to be accepting the award from people I admire.
You can view all the winners here. Without wanting to sound too gushy, I think they are all brilliant so I don’t want to name any one over another. But go – check these sites out, admire, and be inspired!
Tags: Irish Web Awards, IWA08, Most Accessible Website in Ireland
