Award Review: Interactive Media Awards (IMA)
The Interactive Media Awards seem to cater toward professional web design firms and designers that do web design for a living. The web site has a convincing Top Ten Reasons to Enter list.
For a description of the awards, the official web site says the following:
The Interactive Media Awards™ competition is open to individuals and organizations involved in designing, developing, managing, supporting and promoting websites.
Nominations are accepted from around the world from web design firms, advertising agencies and corporate marketing departments, as well as individual web designers and graphic artists, among others.
We aim to increase the standards of excellence on the Internet and welcome all who will join us in this effort. However, in order to achieve our goal and promote the highest standards of ethical behavior and professional conduct, certain types of websites are not eligible to enter.
There are four categories of web sites, each separated by different quarters of the year. Each category appears only once during the year. However, web sites can be submitted to multiple categories if applicable, and multiple awards can be won by the same web site. Of course, submitting to two or more categories also means that you will be paying two or more entry fees (more on that later).
Judges come from the membership of the Interactive Media Council, Inc., a nonprofit organization. The web site claims that these judges are leaders in web design, advertising, public relations, news and other industries and are on the panel by invitation only.
The actual judging system is what makes the awards very interesting. As the web site explains:
Each site is reviewed by at least three judges. After each judge has finished evaluating an entry, IMC (1) automatically eliminates the lowest of the three scores, and (2) computes the average of the two higher scores to determine the judges’ overall score. In order to achieve the highest level of objectivity and recognition for subtle quality of workmanship and other important yet non-visual factors, certain components of each judge’s score (such as Standards Compliance and true Cross-Browser Compatibility) are elevated or lowered by the site’s performance in a series of automated standards and accessibility tests.
Websites receiving an overall score of 480-500 points receive our “Best in Class” award. Websites receiving an overall score of 460-479 points receive our “Outstanding Achievement” award. Under our system, it is possible that no entry in a given industry category will qualify to win a Best in Class or Outstanding Achievement award. Conversely, it is also possible that more than one entry may qualify to win the same award in the same year.
Judging criteria includes design, content, feature functionality, usability, standards compliance and cross-browser compatability.
The fee for entry is $125 per web site and $75 for non-profit web sites.
The award seems reputable and good publicity for winners and runners up. However, it would be good to see more details about the judges. For example, the Web Marketing Association’s Web Award has a listing of the companies and jobs of their judges. The IMAs are extremely vague about the judge selection process, only mentioning a few industries.