To be considered for the Sandra-Miller.com Best of the Web Writing Award, your website must meet the following criteria:

1. The site must not contain hate, racist, illegal, pornographic, or other offensive material.  The site must not link to or promote this type of site.

2. The site must contain at least three pages of original content.

3. The site must focus on writing or writers.  This can include showcasing your own writing, administering a showcase where other writers may showcase their work, running writing contests, offering resources and information for writers, etc.  Copyright notices must be displayed for all writing included on the site.

4. The site must acknowledge the creator of all non-original graphics.

5. The site must not have pop-ups, pop-unders, or exit exchange ads.  Forced pop-ups used by free web servers such a Geocities and Tripod are excluded from this requirement.

Those five items are the basic criteria all sites must meet to be evaluated.  A winning site must display both original content and good design.  Sites will be evaluated in the latest versions of both Internet Explorer and Netscape.  If your site is optimized for one or the other, please note this on your index page.  Once these five criteria are met, the following items will also be considered:

1. Does the site use correct grammar and spelling?

2. Does the site make good use of graphics and text colors; does the background make the text hard to read?

3. If the site uses frames, are they properly implemented to display on both major browsers (IE and Netscape)?

4. Does the site require a horizontal scrollbar at 800 x 600 resolution?

5. Is the site divided into appropriately sized, logically organized pages, or is it one long page?

6. Is the site's navigation easy to understand and use?

7. Are there obvious HTML coding errors, or does the site cause the browser to throw errors when opened?

8. Does the site provide content interesting and/or useful to writers or readers?

9. Does the site load in a reasonable amount of time?

10. Does the site have a consistent feel on all pages?

11. Are all graphics in place and displaying properly, or are some "broken"?

12. Do all internal links work?  No 404's, page not found, or forbidden errors?

13. Do 90% of all external links work?

14. If advertising banners are present, does the site only use one per page?

15. Does the site contain an overabundance of animated graphics, blinking text, or other "gimmicks" that are distracting?

There are a few things that invariably cause a negative impression, and will lessen your chances of winning the award.  These things are:

1. Overuse of animated gifs, blinking text, and other gimmicks
2. Overuse of advertising banners
3. Scrolling text through the status bar of the browser.  This is distracting and conceals the target location of links.

In addition there are certain things which, if found on your website, will disqualify you on the spot.  These things are:

1. Pornography, hate/racist material, profanity, illegal, or other offensive materials.
2. Multi-level marketing material
3. Sites that are sheer "vanity" sites with no useful content
4. Pages that prompt for a download of Comet Cursor or other spyware 
5. Sites that crash my browser

As much as possible, this will be an objective process.  You will be notified within three weeks whether your site has won an award or not--you will receive an email either way.  Linking the award graphic back to www.sandra-miller.com is appreciated.  If your website does not win an award and you have implemented changes that you feel will better its chances, feel free to resubmit.  Please wait at least three weeks before resubmitting.  Sites that do not respect the three-week waiting period will not be re-evaluated.  Signing my guestbook is never a requirement to win this award.

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