Web Designers Unite for Innovation Excellence
A Contest for Web Designers to Benefit the Innovation Excellence Community
ATTENTION web designers of the world.
The Innovation Excellence community needs your help and we’ve got a prize up for grabs.
Most of the disruptive, square peg in a round hole innovators that visit this site start at the bottom of the site, not the top – beginning their visit on an article page and then exploring the site from there.
This behavior of course does not surprise us, but we do think that the design of our article pages could be much better to help bottom-up visitors discover more of the great content on the site (3,800+ articles and counting).
So, rather than paying a single designer to fix this problem or using someone else’s community to gather input and pick a winner (with the winner getting a little cash and no exposure for their business), we thought we would run our own design challenge to bring much more attention to the best entering web designers. So here goes:
The Reward
- The Top 10 Entries (by judging) will receive priceless visibility (including linked company name) in a Top 10 Entries article with the winning entry receiving a profile of their business in the article (with multiple links) to a community of 100,000+ monthly visitors
- Winning Entry will receive a $250 cash prize
- Winning Entry will also receive a 20-pack of article banners on Innovation Excellence ($400 value)
- Winning Entry will get a signed copy of the popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire by Braden Kelley
The Challenge
We are Looking for Web Designers all around the world to take a look at our article pages, like this one:
https://www.disruptorleague.com/blog/2011/08/01/innovation-is-all-about-value/
And provide your design input for how you would change our article page design (in WordPress) to help visitors:
- Discover more content and spend more productive time on the site
- Productively visit more pages per visit
The key word you’ll notice in both is productive – we don’t want people spending more time finding their way or clicking through unnecessary pages – we want people to spend more time on the site reading great content and engaging with the community and visiting more pages because they see another article they want to read or another question or comment they want to make.
To have your response judged please make sure you submit:
- A visualization of your design in a PowerPoint or PDF or PNG format
- The code to make any widgets,etc. recommended in your design work
- Anything else not listed required to make your design work
Please EMAIL your entries to designcontest AT innovationexcellence DOT com
We look forward to seeing your submissions and featuring the winners (and the rest of the Top 10)!
PARTICULARS: For a prize to be awarded we must receive at least ten entries by midnight GMT on January 27, 2011 (the deadline for entries). Assuming we get at least ten entries (which we should) then the top ten entries and the winner will be announced no later than midnight GMT on January 31, 2011.
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You have to make contests like this because you don’t have any money to buy the expertise of real world class webmasters… well for your information… webmasters are sick and tired of corporate nobody’s trying to hitch hike on the years of on hand experience… and we’re not about to trade our proprietary trade secrets for a doggy bisquit.
Hello Daniel,
Thank you for your comment, but this site is not built or run by corporate nobody’s.
Instead it was built my me in my own personal quest to make the world a better place, and expanded into Innovation Excellence along with partners who share that vision.
We’re offering cash and exposure worth thousands of dollars to the winner and the nine runner ups. Not exactly a doggy biscuit.
All the best,
Braden
@innovate
Essentially this is spec work, frowned upon by both the Registered Graphic Designers of Canada and the American Institute of Graphic Design. Sadly, this continues to set a bad precedent for the design industry as a whole. Our clients choose to work with us through portfolio reviews, estimates and relationships… the way business transactions of value occur. What we create is as a result of market research and collaboration – it’s not a pretty picture or a shot in the dark. Innovation would be paying for the work you say you value. Needless to say we will not be participating.
Hello Lissa,
We are trying to engage in a bit of Crowdsourcing and offering a package of compensation worth thousands of dollars in exchange to the winner and hundreds of dollars worth of compensation to nine runners up.
I’m sorry it doesn’t meet with your approval. Because of the subject matter of this site we really should try to use the tools of our focus area, and that is what we are doing.
If we fail to get sufficient participation in this way, then our next stop will be 99Designs where the winner will get far less than the great cash and exposure we have the ability to offer thanks to our large audience – exposure and credit for the work that we won’t offer if we go another route because it will be a financial transaction.
I understand your point, but given our traffic and our topic area I hope you understand that we are offering something truly special and a bit unique, and a chance to stand out from the crowd and a chance to help make this labor of love for the global innovation community a little bit better for everyone.
We aren’t exactly some huge multinational operating this site purely for profit, the site’s goal is to make innovation insights accessible for the greater good.
Hopefully we will find ten people directly through our site with some good ideas on how to meet the design challenge, but if not we’ll go another route consistent with our topic area.
All the best,
Braden
@innovate