for excellence in Australian Web Design
The McFarlane Prize is awarded by a jury of Australian experts in various fields of web profession. The decision process has two stages. In the first stage, entries are assessed for their adherence to best practices in accessibility and standards based coding (correct and valid use of CSS and HTML). These criteria are outlined in detail here.
The top 15 sites from this phase will be individually assessed in four areas by members of the jury who have expertise in a particular area.
These areas are
Based on the two rounds of judging, the McFarlane Prize shortlist will be announced is mid September.
The final announcement will be made at the Web Directions Conference, October 7th 2009.
We thank all our judges for their generosity with their time and expertise. The Jury for this years McFarlane Prize is:
Virginia Murdoch is a partner in Inventive Labs, a young Melbourne web development company. She started life as an editor and a designer of print magazines, but now designs application interfaces and web sites for companies large and small, and teaches design theory and hands-on technical skills to designers and artists. She is inspired by excellent design in any field.
Virginia is our special guest first round design judge for 2009.
Michael is a co-founder and developer at Agency Rainford. Using lightweight tools and methodologies to produce large, well-tested web applications he feels more like an engineer and less like a magician every day. Michael is a previous winner of the McFarlane Prize in 2007.
Michael is our design judge for 2009.
Matthew Magain is the Managing Editor of sitepoint.com, a Melbourne-based publisher and online community dedicated to helping people build a better web. He is also the organizer for Melbourne’s Web Standards Group, and has a soft spot for crazy Japanese TV and pints of Kilkenny (preferably at the same time). In his spare time he regularly neglects his personal site, m-dash.
Matt is our coding judge for 2008.
Penny Hagen is a Design Strategist with over 10 years experience designing and producing interactive projects in Australia and New Zealand. Penny promotes the use of collaborative design methods to include stakeholders and users in the design process and build a shared vision for the user experience. Penny is currently completing a PhD in participatory design methods for social technologies at UTS in Sydney. Previously Penny worked as the Projects Director/Strategist at Digital Eskimo guiding the user experience design process, overseeing all production and driving their experimental design research program.
Penny is the user experience judge for 2009
Damien McCormack is an accessibility expert and manager of Vision Australia’s web accessibility services. Seven years experience working with people who are blind or have low vision has evolved into a passion and drive to make the world more accessible. In this time, Damien has worked with a large number of government departments, commercial organisations and educational institutions promoting accessibility and providing business and technical advice across all aspects of a project. Damien is also responsible for developing the culture of accessibility within Vision Australia and experiences the challenges of delivering accessible outcomes daily.
Damien is the accessibility judge for 2009
In the first round of judging, sites will be objectively assessed for their use of best practices in the areas of
as well by our special first round design judge.
In each of these areas a score will be awarded. The 20 highest scoring sites according to these criteria will be then assessed by our Jury of experts. At the Juries discretion, sites may be added to this list, or fewer than 20 sites may be considered for the second round.
Scores will be allocated as follows in the first round.
The home page of the site will be tested using accessibility testing software such as Cynthia Says. Sites will be assessed for their compliance with Level A and AA of the WCAG1 content accessibility guidelines. 1 point will be deducted for each failure to comply with a Level 1 or 2 guideline.
The home page of the site will be assessed for how valid its HTML or XHTML is (maximum 20 points), and how appropriately it uses HTML (maximum 10 points).
When assessing validity, pages will be validated with the W3C's HTML validator.
The minimum score for this part is 0
When assessing appropriate use of structural and semantic HTML, the following deductions will be made.
Points will be added for use of more sophisticated aspects of HTML, such as the appropriate use of class and id values, and good use of structured and semantic HTML. Sites will receive a maximum of 5, and minimum of 0 points in this section.
The home page of the site will be assessed for whether it uses valid CSS.
A score out of 10 will be awarded.
When assessing validity, pages will be validated with the W3C's CSS validator.
Points will also be added for use of more sophisticated CSS as appropriate - including advanced CSS selectors (e.g. descendent and child selectors), and properties. A maximum of 5 and minimum of 0 will be awarded in this section.
In this round, our guest design Judge will award a score out of 20 for each design, based on criteria such as typography, use of whitespace, color, as well as overal appeal.
In the second round of judging, each of our expert judges scroes each of the sites which pass a certain threshold in the first round in their area of expertise. These scores are then totalled, to produce a shortlist of six sites.
This shortlist is then discussed by the Judges, who name the winner, and any highly commended sites.
As experts in their fields, the members of the Jury have worked with many organisations, and on many projects. This gives rise to the possibility that a nominated site has an association, either direct or indirect, with a member of the Jury. Our policy is that should this be the case for shortlisted sites, this association will be explicitly declared.