Those two agencies combined for 37 of the 96 awards handed out for web development work by the Web Marketing Association.
Web development at its finest came into focus with the WebAwards handed out to winners in 96 industries.
All of those winners matched up head to head yielded one best of show selection – TBS: Department of Humor Analysis, created by Brooklyn-based Big Spaceship:
TBS’s Dept. of Humor Analysis works hard to put the “very-” in front of “funny.” To help TBS steer clear of common pitfalls in this cut-throat, dog-eat-dog, rabbit-outwit-duck, duck-shoot-pig, anvil-smush-coyote, Chico-trip-Zeppo field of funny business, Big Spaceship joined forces (with) Mother Interactive to turn their very silly questionnaire into an addictive, fully interactive web site.
RGA picked up 19 of the WebAwards, just ahead of Zugara with 18.
The Web Marketing Association named R/GA their Top Agency for 2006:
The Top Agency Award recognizes the consistently outstanding development pursued by interactive firms when creating top website designs. R/GA has also won more WebAwards than any other organization during the past decade, although this is their first Top Agency Award. R/GA, headquartered in New York, won 12 Outstanding and 7 Standard of Excellence WebAwards.
Those 96 categories included a few our business-oriented readers may recognize.
Corporate Communications developed Spot Runner, which picked up an Outstanding award for Best Advertising Website.
In the Marketing category, the judges like Rare Method’s work on Silvertip Resort the best.
Ogilvy One received the nod for its work on IBM’s Help Desk II in the Information Services category.
Web development has become so much more of a skill and an art now than it was ten years ago, when function was viewed as vastly more important than form. It is good to see form can enhance function, and web developers can be recognized for doing so.
Development is not as easy as it looks. As noted in a recent post to the O’Reilly ONLamp blog, Jonathan Wellons wrote how a colleague who has never been a web developer before expects to understand JavaScript quickly by learning its syntax.
Commenters on the post do not anticipate things will be that easy for the colleague, who has a background working in programming in multi-threaded environments. One response, from Paul Laroquod, summarized the colleague’s prospects with a humorous response:
Your colleague thinks he’s going to basically read the javascript spec and then be able to program in it. You should be laughing in his face. When he gets wind of all of the exceptions and unexpected, undocumented behaviour on all the various browsers he needs to code for, he’ll start to get really frustrated and wonder whether the web was designed by an idiot savant in between bouts of counting spilled toothpicks.
For the record, Tim Berners-Lee has never been known to have any particular affection for totaling up toothpicks.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
