I had the opportunity to coordinate the WOW (World Organization of Webmasters) national web design contest in Kansas City, MO with Bill Cullifer. Thirty secondary teams (2 individuals) and 16 post-secondary teams competed for over $190,000 in education scolarships and prizes. Winners will be announced tonight in front of 15,000 people at Kemper Arena.
Emphasis was on web standards, accessibility and teamwork. There were 12 challenges (6 – secondary; 6 – post-secondary) for the teams to complete. We had 11 judges (offsite – judging via the WWW) reviewing over 40 different aspects of the pages created by students to meet these challenges. We accumulated over 12,000 individual evaluations/ judge decisions to arrive at first, second and third place winners. I developed judging forms using LiveCycle ES (which significantly expedited the tally of results). Given the volume of information, I don’t know that we would have been able to submit the results by the deadline without the use of dynamic PDF files as well as collecting the information in the internal data store of responses. [More details…]
We have done this contest for the past 6 years (I have been a part since inception). We are now seeing the results of our efforts to improve what is covered in various curricula. Many teams are now able to apply CSS based layouts to their pages (something that was relatively rare when we began the contest). Every year, it now appears that the students have a broader knowledge base than the previous year.
Through this contest, WOW is stressing the importance of a multitude of web design skills needed to survive in the business world. We are also communicating to a number of teachers and advisors the importance and complexity of this field.
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