News reaching me indicates that Zenith Bank Plc's website (www.zenithbank.com)
won the annual Web Jurist Awards (organised yearly by Phillips Consulting).
What is remarkable about this award is that financial institutions have started paying
massive attention to the look and feel of their websites (content and functionality),
even going to the extent of seeding comments from Nairaland webmasters.

One thign though: I would love Phillips Consulting to involve more categories in their
web jurist awards. This will showcase more Nigerian web designers/ developers and programmers.
Abi, what do you guys think?


NB: Access Bank Plc came second (www.accessbankplc.com). They came first last year after usurping Zenith Bank's position.
Fidelity Bank Plc came third (This is their first time coming top three: www.fidelitybankplc.com).

See web jurist website: www.web-jurist.com (they haven't updated their website as at time of posting)

Though I disagree with their choice (I won't digress so don't ask me to provide which site I feel is best ), I am happy that we have finally started having awards like this.

The most important thing to me is that nigerian businesses with websites actually pay attention to such awards and employ *qualified* individuals/companies to continuously improve upon their websites.

A few months or so ago, I wrote an article here which basically stated that soon, the era of "I want a website" will be over. The next phase, just like in the states, will be, "I don't like the way my site looks. Make it better". If you don't listen to anything I have said on NL before, listen to this one please, "the next money-making web dev opportunity in naija will be web redesign." So sharpen your skills folks so that when the proverbial roll is called up yonder, you'll be there and ready to serve.

You are right yawa. Their site is not that great to be the best. NEVER!

On the issue of redesign, it has started oooooo. I'm really telling u. The clients I have now are all talking redesign and not a new design.

@OmniPotens & @Yawa-ti-de: I feel you guys.
But I would have to ask you for your own version (ratings).
Who would you have voted for. Let's do our own Nairaland
Web Awards.

Oya, Yawa-ti-de: Let's start asking for submissions and panelists.
It's time to switch the revolution. Come on.


And hey, OmniPotens: redesign and new design end up as the same thing.
You start changing small small elemnets and end up with something totally new,
while still retaining some traits of the old/former.

It's all semantics.

olushola,

If you read my comments above, you will find somewhere nestled b/w what I will quickly admit sounds like gibberish, words to the effect that I shouldn't be asked or my winners

If you insist sha, post a link of all banks that you know have websites and I will gladly pick a winner, and with reason to boot.

Yawa, you can judge anyway since you have time to spare. For me, it's the last thing on my mind now. Not thinking about it at all for now. The only thing I can do is to look at the webs and pick up features on them and integrate on my designs

Yawa, you can judge anyway since you have time to spare.

and who told you that?

Tech Pros,

Though I can't vouch for phillip consulting's qualifications, i will in a way vouch for why such an award, assuming it is recognized industry-wide, makes sense:

As promised, I won't bore anyone with my choices but I did go through the sites of the 25 consolidated sites. Guess what the first thing I did was: Try to open an account online. Only 1 (my choice for #1 which incidentally isn't zenith ) was able to give me something satisfying. The next thing I tried to do was to get the address of my local branch.

If I were a customer, chances are, without knowing anything else about the site, i would have gone for my #1 choice. Now, imagine others thinking alike. That would imply more customers which would imply more revenue for the bank. Hopefully you understand where I am coming from.

By the way, I don't know how the judges ruled for accessibility. I also would have added a category for "code bloat" or words to that effect. ALL banks failed in the aforementioned 2 areas:

1) They all had javascript and CSS on the pages
2) They all had images with no TITLE or ALT tags filled out
3) They all used tables (if you think this isn't a big deal, then you obviously hasn't visited a site with a screenreader. This is how it sounds with tables, "table - row - cell - colspan 2 - welcome to zenith bank - row -cell", etc. Now imagine having to hear this each time the screen reader encountered an embedded table. Imagine further 5 levels of embedded tables

I would sure love to be a judge, that is, assuming they paid me right

You see what I mean Yawa, o'er time

Wow! the horizontal scroll was the bomb! I mean, it scrolled to infinity and beyond.

what a masterpiece!

I must say i disagree with some aspects of the ratings, but its all good, one of my sites also won an award and got good rankings who am i to complain when s@#@t looks good

@ Yawa ti de.
Please, which one is your choice?

Noah, read every post, from #1 to yours then ask me the same question again

in the village of the blind, the one-eyed man is king

The Web-Jurist is doing the right thing, let's just say they have a poor pool of candidates to work with. so while all sites ranked might fail more stringent or simple best practice tests, they will come up tops in a class of dunderheads.

But they sure are whipping up action in the right direction.