Irish Web Awards: a look at two winners
– posted October 14th, 2008 by Laurence Veale One comment
Energy. Passion. Enthusiasm.
Don’t worry, Royston Brady isn’t making a political comeback, at least I hope not. I’m talking about the Irish Web Awards which took place on Saturday night in Dublin’s Radisson Hotel.
Well run, well attended and above all, really good fun.
I was flying the iQ flag on the night and handed out two awards for the categories we sponsored.
- Most innovative website: Pixenate (Walter Higgings)
- Most accessible website: Kanchi.org (Maryrose Lyons)
Pixenate
Pixenate is an online photo editor, allowing users to upload, alter and improve their photos. A very simple interface and one that’s a pleasure to use.
I’m a Flickr customer which has a online editing in the shape of Picnik, which frankly I’ll never use. Why? Picnik takes an age to load (no, the hilarious messages don’t make it go quicker) and it doesn’t have the simple and friendly user interface of Pixenate.
In usability parlance the buttons in the Pixenate UI have good “affordance”. In simple terms, there are strong clues as to their fucntion by the way they look.
Hello Flickr, give Walter a call!
But it doesn’t stop there. There’s a real opportunity for print-on-demand services like SnapFish to go beyond the basics and differentiate themselves from their online (and offline) competitors by providing the genuinely useful experience that Pixenate provides.
Below, a simple mock-up showing the before and after.
Hello SnapFish, Give Walter a call!
The team behind Pixenate are collectively known as Sxoop technologies. They’re based in Cork and have a marvelous manifesto, akin to Getting Real:
- We believe that small, focused teams can make great software.
- Great software has a “lived in” quality that comes from time spent Testing, Using and Refining.
- We endeavour to make Software which is not only easy to Use, but easy to Install, Maintain and Customize.
Walter and the team are deserving winners of the most innovative website award.
Oh, and if you want to give Walter a call, his number is listed on sxoop.com.
Kanchi.org
The second award I gave out on the night was to Maryrose Lyons from Brightspark, for most accessible website, Kanchi.org.
I was also a judge of the most accessible website category so I was pretty confident it was going to come out on top.
Visual design
The first thing that struck me when visiting Kanchi.org was how visually stunning it is (it was also nominated as most beautiful website and has since appeared on the beauty pageant website, CSSMania). This puts to bed any argument (if there’s of that silliness still about) that to be accessible, you need to compromise on visual design.
Code quality
Under the hood, the HTML, CSS and JavaScript is clean, uncluttered and elegant. It’s more like poetry and is clearly the work of an artisan. Good design enables where poor design disables and this is clearly good design.
Video captioning
Rarely seen in the wilds of the web, the embedded video is professionally produced and contains captioning.
Well done to Maryrose and the team behind Kanchi.org.
Overall
A night to remember and one to look forward to next year.
And the last word goes to Damien Mulley for organising them. Well done, sir.
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Categories Accessibility, Design, Technology, iQ in the news
One comment so far
1. Maryrose Lyons on Oct 18th, 2008 - 10:27
While the rest of the country has had a bit of a crap week (budget woes etc), looks like our two little worlds have rocked that trend!
Well done to IQContent on the Fast50 win. Well deserved indeed. Both our companies have been passionately doing for more than 5 years now, this week’s official recognition is a Great Thing!!