Website: A Moment of Self-Reflection: Making the Internet a Better Place?
Having just recently celebrated my 30th birthday, I feel like I have spent my life to this point trying in vain to mine accomplishments of significance from a vein of long-perceived potential. You ever feel like you deserve a pat on the back, but receive that proverbial kick in the family jewels instead? Sure my birthday was accompanied by the usual condescension, the plethora of cliché comments which still amount to, "don't worry, you're still young and too naïve to know any better." Not even an advanced degree has helped land me ahead of the learning curve in the eyes of others. I think gaining respect for any wisdom obtained during my eventful life will be a fruitless venture even if I live to be 100, provided there is someone around who is 101.
You might be asking yourself at this point if this is just a random rant of self-pity, or if I may surprise you by hiding in between the lines something you may actually care about, if you give me that much credit. As I finished up making my website Section 508 compliant, someone was nice enough as usual to rain on my parade with some questions that really got me thinking. How many visitors to my site are going to find it necessary or even helpful that my site is WCAG Priority 1 compliant? How many visitors, she asks, come to my site period, and what do I get out of it? Is it worth putting hours and hours of my time into maintaining a website that few will visit? Who needs my approval in the form of a website award? How come the International Internet Awards Community, as we call ourselves, consists of little more than a dozen familiar faces? Do we carry on this charade merely to stroke our own egos and gain the seemly much-needed approval of others through our awards programs?
Perhaps we as a community need to look hard at our purpose statements and really put some more thought into this aspect up front. Most of us in some way claim to be doing this to "make the Internet a better place." However, many of the awards I have applied for have not done a thing for my site, much less the Internet, whether I have won or lost. If an Award Program doesn't give feedback, then it doesn't need to exist, because hopefully no one in this community thinks that simply giving or withholding their approval of a website is making the Internet a better place. I for one am going to try to include even more helpful feedback in my future evaluations.
In addition to feedback, we need to really get beyond just giving awards to each other. I don't think there is a problem with giving each other awards, but if we are the International Internet Awards Community, then we need to find out where the rest of the world is hiding. Perhaps we need a third party nomination system to draw people with quality websites who don't come to us. I think there is so much talent in this community; we could really make the Internet a better place if we could find a way to unobtrusively share our design and content skills with the Internet community at large.
You might be asking yourself at this point if this is just a random rant of self-pity, or if I may surprise you by hiding in between the lines something you may actually care about, if you give me that much credit. As I finished up making my website Section 508 compliant, someone was nice enough as usual to rain on my parade with some questions that really got me thinking. How many visitors to my site are going to find it necessary or even helpful that my site is WCAG Priority 1 compliant? How many visitors, she asks, come to my site period, and what do I get out of it? Is it worth putting hours and hours of my time into maintaining a website that few will visit? Who needs my approval in the form of a website award? How come the International Internet Awards Community, as we call ourselves, consists of little more than a dozen familiar faces? Do we carry on this charade merely to stroke our own egos and gain the seemly much-needed approval of others through our awards programs?
Perhaps we as a community need to look hard at our purpose statements and really put some more thought into this aspect up front. Most of us in some way claim to be doing this to "make the Internet a better place." However, many of the awards I have applied for have not done a thing for my site, much less the Internet, whether I have won or lost. If an Award Program doesn't give feedback, then it doesn't need to exist, because hopefully no one in this community thinks that simply giving or withholding their approval of a website is making the Internet a better place. I for one am going to try to include even more helpful feedback in my future evaluations.
In addition to feedback, we need to really get beyond just giving awards to each other. I don't think there is a problem with giving each other awards, but if we are the International Internet Awards Community, then we need to find out where the rest of the world is hiding. Perhaps we need a third party nomination system to draw people with quality websites who don't come to us. I think there is so much talent in this community; we could really make the Internet a better place if we could find a way to unobtrusively share our design and content skills with the Internet community at large.
Labels: website
posted by Randal A. Burd, Jr. at 6:56 PM
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