The judges said that ZDNet.co.uk has "displayed a fantastic use of Web 2.0 and is… revolutionary, with a thinking behind the site that is streets ahead of its peers".
The awards, which were presented at London's Hyde Park Hilton on Wednesday night, are the highest-profile event for online media in the UK. Entries were 50 percent up on 2006.
ZDNet.co.uk's sister site silicon.com also came away with an award, for best business editorial team of the year. Other winners included Channel4oD, FT.com, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Guardian — which walked away with its usual array of gongs.
The judges voted for ZDNet.co.uk because of the work it has done to integrate community features with editorial, and the range of features that allow readers to blog about issues affecting them, find others interested in similar issues and create relationships and conversations on the site.
Editor and site director Matt Loney said: "This is tremendous news for everyone who worked on the project, from the developers, designers, HTML coders and project managers to the editorial team who now run it and, of course, for our members who use the site."
Talkback
These are the lowest standards ever I have seen.
The Association of Online Publishers with their so-called awards are obviously not aware of even the simplest web standards. Just run the www.zdnet.co.uk site through an W3C HTML validator and you get this:
Validation Output: 88 Errors.
Worse than alpha and beta testing software.
Also, when it comes to User Accessibility standards, there are loads of errors, too, such as 5 images without alt-tags, 2 missing frame titles, etc.
J.Neuhoff
It's always helpful to hear from the people who use our website about their experiences with it. Could you please send more information about what you did and the results you got to me? I'm at Community.Manager@zdnet.co.uk. I'll pass the details on to the tech team here for them to take a look at it.
You can run the www.zdnet.co.uk through the W3C validator, and it lists all the HTML errors. Most of them are easy to fix:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.zdnet.co.uk&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
As regards improving accessibility standards:
Just type in your URL into the form at
http://webxact.watchfire.com/
Having all said that, your website provides good contents and is quite informative.
J.Neuhoff
Just a quick note to give you some feedback from the HTML team here.
You’re right that the website has a lot of validation errors and the developers here note that this is an area that’s important to them. They are always working to make sure the site code is compliant and meets accessibility guidelines. They have a couple of challenges in this, though: ZDNet.co.uk is very dynamic, being frequently refreshed with new ads, news stories and so on. That means that it is an ongoing job to maintain standards compliant code on the site. Another complication is that code is sometimes added by nondevelopers—in blog postings, for example.
They appreciate any help ZDNet members can give them, so please send any specific examples or problems to them via me at Community.Manager@zdnet.co.uk.
While the quality of the writing and opinions a re great, and the range of information is quite useful, I agree with others here that it is completely let down on standards, usability and speed.
Even on my 8MB line it is the slowest site I have ever come across.
Surely your dev team have heard of web standards (www.webstandards.org) accessibility and the DDA? If not who have you got in charge of development???
I notice you removed the BETA tag from your logo top left but you should not be asking about how to check for valid code if you are in charge of a website, really.
.. And I can't quite make our what you are saying through the snowstorm you just raised there.
I am afraid each and every point you made is erroneous. I have created and visited many dynamic sites and do not encounter this level of bad code. The quantity of articles and adverts has nothing to do with the non-compliant code.
1. Refreshing adverts has nothing to do with the bad code and the adverts do not contribute to the bad code
2. If you built your templates properly you would not be starting with bad code, as you are now, instead of falsely claiming that others, for example those in blogs, are responsible for the bad code. Very lame excuse. The page I am writing in now, like the home page, has bad code on it. Nothing to do with external bloggers and completely within the control of your own developers.
3. If you are right and claim that non-compliant code is being added by non-developers, what in the name of Tim Berners-Lee are you doing exposing your system to allow for code to be entered unchecked? Are you begging to be hacked? That alone would make me take a developer OFF a project, not defend them!
4. Compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act is a statutory requirement; i.e.: the law. I notice ZDNet wrote a leader about this in August 2005 (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/leader/0,1000002982,39215181,00.htm), yes 2005!!! but you failed to act on it.
Standards, complaint code, Accessible websites and user-cerntered design will be the touchstones for the next wave on the web and you should be at the front, not dragging your feet and blaming the bloggers.
And asking for examples of bad code from us the users smacks of Alpha-release, not final release. Hire people who know what these terms mean, employ a stringent set of tests to ensure they comply, and read and understand your own intelligence on the issue.