Site awards
Two ways to tell someone their site is good. Judge the same six sites both ways and watch what changes.
One: hand out a badge
No score. No order. Applications reopen when the owner feels like it.The requirements, as the program states them
 Good Start Award Easy | A site that is just starting out. More of a participation award than anything. |
 Cute Award Easy | A cute site, whether in layout, content or both. |
 Art Award Medium | Focuses on or contains illustrations, graphic design or pixel art that you made yourself. |
 Fun Site Award Medium | Lots of games, activities, articles to read, things to do. |
 Nostalgic Award Hard | Makes me feel like I have stepped back in time, and does it in a way that fills me with longing for the old days. |
Winner's Circle
That table is in the order you gave them out. Not by score, not by quality, not by anything. Everyone who qualified is on it and nobody is above anybody. The one rule that makes it work is the last one on the real program's page: Link to me after receiving the award, either by linking the award image itself, or in a description before/after the image.
The award is a two-way link wearing a trophy costume.
Two: hand out a number
Lycos TOP 5%, 1998. A jury, a rubric, and a 0 to 100 score you can sort by.How informative the site is. Does it cover its topic in a broad, deep and thorough manner? Is the information useful, accurate and up-to-date?
The site's layout and presentation. Does it lead visitors through the information nicely? Are the pages beautiful, colorful and easy to use?
Combines the content and design metrics with criteria such as amusement, personality, and charm. Is the site fun, inviting and captivating? Would you like to meet the people behind the site?
What the numbers mean, as the reviewers explained them
| 100-90 | The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan. not only good but important and influential |
| 89-80 | The Who, Joni Mitchell, Beach Boys. strong but occasionally uneven |
| 79-70 | Led Zeppelin, Elton John, The Doors. broad appeal but sometimes lacking ideas |
| 69-60 | relatively ordinary |
| 59-50 | sites that barely make the Lycos TOP 5% cut |
| 49-01 | unusually low quality |
TOP 5% directory, sorted by Overall
| # | Site | Content | Design | Overall |
|---|
The third model does not even name the winner
Cool Site of the Day, captured 26 December 1996. One slot, one day. The winning site is not written anywhere on the page. It is behind a picture, and the link runs through a click counter first.
Today's Cool Site
Still Cool: The Cool Site Archives
Cool Site of the Year
No rank. No score. No runners-up. Tomorrow this is a different site and there is no page that lists them both in order.
The page carries something else worth keeping: a <meta name="keywords"> block of roughly thirty adjectives, irreverent, entertaining, funky, joyful, festive, laugh, laughter, amusement, play, recreation, foolishness, preposterous, absurd, zany, lunatic, crazy, looney, wacky
. That is 1996 keyword stuffing, sitting on the page of an award for taste.
Field marks
How to spot a site award.
400 × 32040 to 92 KBA large graphic with the giver's name on it
displayed on the winner's page rather than the giver's. The five awards on the live program are all exactly 400x320, animated, and 40 to 92 KB, which was an enormous share of a page's weight.
Link to me after receiving the awardA link-back requirement in the rules
The badge is only free if you do not count the outbound link. This is what separates an award from a review.
A stated difficulty
Easy through Hard, published next to the requirement. A rubric with no number in it.
NameSiteA Winner's Circle table
in the order people won, with no column you can sort. If the table sorts, it is not this kind of award.
/topics/<Name>_Overall.htmlA score out of 100
and the giveaway that it is a ranking: the URL. Lycos filed each of its eighteen topics at /topics/<Name>_Overall.html, so the default sort is baked into the path.
Sites cannot pay to be listed in the TOP 5% directoryAn integrity disclaimer
Only the scored awards need one. The peer programs never say sites cannot pay, because the idea does not arise.
What it solved, and what took it
An award was a stranger with taste telling you they had read your site. It solved discovery at the scale where a person could still do it by hand, and it paid in the only currency the old web had, which was a link and some attention. The badge on your page was evidence somebody had actually looked.
Lycos TOP 5% is the version that scaled, and scaling it required a number. Once quality is a number it can be sorted, and once it can be sorted the bottom of the list is a problem to be solved. Their own help page says so plainly: sites outflanked by its competition
are removed. Nothing was doing that to the Cute Award.
A person with taste told you your work was good, in public, in a form you could keep.