
Over the years I have found that web awards tend to fall into three types:
- The mindless handout of awards to favour colleagues.
- Awards for the prettiest or most unusable but funky hip design.
- An award that is a true test and representation of the best in the industry.
What I find that you are really looking for is a web award competition that acts as a yard stick to measure your skills that is judged by your peers in the web industry, not advertising executives.

It’s one of those wet August days in Perth when the sunny and rain just can’t make up their mind who really wants to be the dominate partner. In a similar way a web design business can wrestle with a similar issue. Do you use someone else’s pre-built templates or do you roll your own designs.
Between User Experience and Information Architecture gigs I usually squeeze in a little standard front end web site development. Over the years I have rolled my own, designing each website from scratch to the final interactive site. I have prided myself in this production of a higher quality result that my clients where looking for. Something unique that they knew was a once off.

Well Internet Explorer 8 is out of Beta and has finally been released. It didn’t meet the IE8 in 2008 proclamation that some where betting on. But no matter at least it is here, better late than never, eh.
Yes it’s faster meaner, clean and generally a better browser than IE7. There is lots of fancy stuff I can’t use from a design view as other browsers don’t support it, but innovation is still good. As a User Experience designer, it’s a nicer browser to work with. It lines up and supports most of the standards, mind you I do suspect it was written to pass Acid 2 specifically and not o be complaint with all of the upcoming W3C guidelines.

Seems the W3C is running into a little trouble with it’s validation service. You know know the one, the HTML and CSS validation tools that allows you to validate your sites to the W3C guidelines. They are now calling for financial assistance in the form for sponsorship and donations. This does raise the question how is it that the W3C with its expensive membership fees and list of prestigious supporters has gotten itself into this type of predicament.