Web Awards

Australian Model Railway Association Incorporated Web Awards Old Criteria

The following lists the criteria used to judge those sites which were awarded the blue "Great Site" Awards.

These sites were judged against criteria in three area - construction 20%, design 40%, and content 40%.

Maximum points for each category are indicated by the numbers shown in bold preceding each description.

Note that a no score at any time during the construction and design sections of the scoring of the site would have eliminated a web site from further consideration. In addition, sites which score less than 45 points in these two sections of the scoring were eliminated from further consideration.

Sites obtaining a score of 78 or over received the blue AMRA 'Great Site' award.

Site Construction (20%)

A site using standards compliant code with small page sizes and no horizontal scrollbar at low resolutions is useable by more visitors irrespective of their operating system, browser, screen resolution, and connection method. Top content is useless if the site takes so long to load that your visitors give up waiting before it finishes loading or they can't see the pages properly once they have loaded.

The following criteria on how the site is constructed were judged based on the site home page and/or any other page or pages that AMRA determines. If more than one page was chosen then average scores were used.

• 12 Compliance to coding standards (subtract 1 for each error, more than 20 = no score)
  The selected page(s) were tested against the W3C HTML standards. Multiple occurrences of the same error were only counted once. Only the first two occurrences of similar errors were counted.
   
• 05 Page size (< 30k = 5, < 40k = 4, < 50k = 2, < 70k = 1, > 100k = no score)
  Page size were calculated by adding together the sizes of all of the files that constitute the page including the html file, all image files, client side scripts, and any multimedia files.
   
• 03 Monitor Resolution with no horizontal scrollbar visible (640x480 = 3, 800x600 = 1, > 1024x768 = no score)

Site Design (40%)

A consistent easy to navigate site design makes visiting a site a pleasant experience and ensure that visitors are able to find what is on the site and understand and use what they find. A site with the best content in the world is useless if visitors are unable to find their way around the site.

The site design was judged based on the layout of all of the pages on the site.

• 04 Page Layout (pleasing arrangement = 1, consistent = 2, fonts = 1)
• 03 Logical Page Breakup
• 05 Appearance (colour scheme = 2, image clarity = 1, correct spelling = 2)
• 08 Navigation (easy to use = 3, consistent = 2, don't rely on java or flash = 2, don't rely on javascript = 1)
• 05 Link Integrity (subtract 1 for each broken external link, broken internal link = no score)
• 05 Interactivity (email = 2, guest book = 2, poll = 1)
• 03 Website purpose (clear statement on homepage = 3, obvious without stating = 1)
• 07 Supporting diagrams and/or photos (subtract 1 for each spot where a diagram or photo would have helped)

Content (40%)

The score for this section was determined by vote of an AMRA sub-committee consisting of between two and four AMRA members provided that the site had scored at least forty five points in the preceding two sections. Each judge awarded points out of ten and if fewer than four judges were used then the resultant score was scaled up to give a figure out of forty. This score was added to that from the previous two sections to give the final score for the site.