Having said that daft and myhome haven’t really changed and they’re still nominated, but at same time they are very very sucessful sites. and are well known brands now.
would take a lot to kick these two off the top spot..

You can get a feel for the number of problems from the Total Validator (‘TV’) figures. ‘TV core’ relate to parsing errors, ‘TV HTML’ are HTML errors and ‘TV WCAG’ are accessibility errors. The numbers in each column give you the number of errors returned by this test.

I will be posting some info on the most common errors I found during the testing when I get a chance.

Rgds and thanks for your comment (which touches on a lot of important issues for any site).

Richard

I’d be interested to see of those that failed some sort of scale of how critical or badly they failed.

I know I have a few alt tags missing on images which maybe make a rounded corner on a box, and should possibly just have a empty alt tag instead of none.. but it can be easy to fail a vaidator over something really simple and non-critical. Not trying to excuse sloppy or lazy coding.

I’d say its more important to ensure that it displays well cross browser, degrades gracefully in older browsers. Accessability is important also. But I think if it does what its meant to do, and meets your objectives that maybe this is where the goldenspiders are coming from and anyway.

anyway, its good for business, good pr and its nice to get recognition externally..

Dara

As you said, it’s nice to be shortlisted and it’s good for business. Aside from the low standards of many of those shortlisted and its overall effect on this industry, this was my secondary argument. Yes I paid 100 Euro to enter and no I didn’t get shortlisted, with linkage to my small new business – beaten by far inferior sites. Hardly fair I think (especially considering 3 of the judges are my direct competition)

The exercise was simply to show that many, if not most, of the sites nominated have very poor coding standards.

I agree that some of the sites are good (I haven’t had time to take as detailed a look as I would like), but I do intend doing some subjective analysis of one or two of the websites covered.

I am very interested in any follow-on thoughts you have. Do please post a link or email me when you you have some further input on this.

Thanks for your comment.

Rgds

Richard.

Very interesting posts about the Golden Spiders. I understand where you are coming from on the issue of standards. I’ve actually got one of the sites that I have done, up for nomination (it won’t take you long to find out which one) and after viewing this, I doubled checked the site and fixed up some bits and pieces to make it fully compliant (well, the home page anyway… need a little bit more work on the inside cms pages I think). When the site was originally launched, it was tested for all but the WAVE test above and all seemed fine. Even my IE hacks in the CSS validated a couple of months ago but now have been fixed to compliant standards. Anywho… that’s a side point…

You’re making some good valid points on the whole compliant issue but at the same time, I’m very proud to have a site up for the awards this year. Whether the site wins or not, it will still help boost my business IMO. So, are people saying that winning a Golden Spider is pointless or doesn’t mean anything because the general standard is low? I don’t think all the sites up for nomination are bad… some are suspect alright and yes, I agree the compliance issue needs to be addressed. I may be biased but I actually think the site that I have up for nomination is quite a good site and has gotten some good reviews from users and web pros alike.

To conclude, good work (and I’d say a good bit of time went into it) on the analysis of compliancy of nominations. You’ve actually given me and idea along with some other posts from Michele and a couple of others, which I’ll discuss on another site, which is a little off topic here but I’ll post a link when I’ve done it. Rgds,

Dave

There’s also the other side to the awards which are equally farcical – where sponsors and judges can also be nominees and put forward their own sites for awards…

…a comedy of errors!

If you’re going to approach a website which sprouts on about wining a Golden Spider Award but you don’t have a clue what the Golden Spiders are then you should google it. Hopefully then you will see articles like Richards which illustrate the farce of the awards.

This is equivalent to awarding architecture awards to buildings that have rotten foundations and shoddy workmanship – they may look good from a distance, but they are bad buildings.

Frankly this is scary. The public, and businesses in particular are being duped by a clique into thinking that the Golden Spiders indicate a “a high standard of excellence”.

High standards in low places or low standards in high places?