One of my pet projects, the Perth International Arts Festival web site, has been nominated for a Webby Award. Everyone who worked on it is stoked. You can view the site here:
http://www.perthfestival.com.au/

I haven't had time to do a more complete investigation, but just in our category (Websites > Living > Events), our site is the only one out of the five that is built with web standards. Two are completely Flash, and of the other two one is mostly flash with table-based alternate content, and the other is just crufty code - not even a valid DOCTYPE.

It would be interesting to see how many other standards-compliant web sites are finalists in the websites categories. I'm guessing still not many. While there are probably pages on the Festival site that generate warnings (unescaped ampersands and such) the templates and markup were designed with best practises in mind.

So... take a look at the Festival web site and if you think it's worthy of your support, please register to vote in the Webby People's Voice Awards. This is an additional award given in each category, voted by the general public. At the moment, we are coming 5th out of 5 in the voting, and Lollapalooza is a long way ahead, but there is a very small margin between positions 2-5 so with a bit of help, we could make it up a little higher.

But be quick, because voting closes this Friday, April 27:
http://pv.webbyawards.com/

Thanks!

Hi Kay,

Congratulations on the Webby nomination. I too have a website in the same category.

I was the designer on BBC Electric Proms. This project was in some part promotional site and part online music festival for the duration of the event, providing punters with the ability to view all performances from the interactive TV service. So yes, this means Flash. Given that nature of the content, this is unable to be accessible, alternate content. That was problem number one but it never ends there does it?

Problem number two was within the BBC, there are fixed template components that are non-negotiable regardless of the way these had been previously developed. Right now they have their reasons for doing this. For the project build this meant we dealt with legacy code - for front end, interactivity modules and CMS. We tried really hard to change what we could. If you look at most of the BBC sites, you will see this is the case.

While I am an devotee of standards compliant websites (I was the designer on the Home Office redesign, which garnered much respect and benchmarked how government sites could be done), I think it is important to look at all the nominees in the Webby's and realise the diverse set of audiences, budgets and technologies the producers faced, just as you would have your own.

All websites are not created equal, and unfortunately for some, web standards are not always the Holy Grail. Wouldn’t it be nice though?

Good luck with your nomination, I think it is a really lovely website.

Bec