Posted on

Best Mobile Web Sites and Best Mobile Apps of 2017 Named by Web Marketing Association

The Web Marketing Association is pleased to announce the winners its sixth annual international MobileWebAward competition.  This award program recognizes the individual and team achievements of Web professionals all over the world who create and maintain the best mobile Websites and the best mobile applications.  The complete list of winners for each of the 86 industries covered can be found at www.mobile-webaward.org.

“Smartphones and tablet computers are exploding and companies are racing to be allow users to connect and interact with them using mobile devices,” said William Rice, president of the Web Marketing Association.  “The goal of the MobileWebAwards is to both recognize the people and organizations responsible for developing some of the most effective mobile Web sites and mobile apps on the Internet.”

This year’s top awards include:

TMP Worldwide won Best of Show Mobile Website for Walmart Careers with a Mission- Walmart has a rich history of recognizing and honoring Veterans. To speak to this audience on how Walmart can be a resource to veterans for careers, in the community, and the various commitments they make. It’s an invite to those who want to support veterans and their families, and a resource if you are looking for employment which they will guarantee if you’ve honorably discharged. The entry also won Best Military Mobile Website.

Extra Solid Media, LLC won Best of Show Mobile Application for UMass Dining Services. The Award-Winning Dining of University of Massachusetts Amherst app makes it simple to access all of the favorite campus dining locations with daily menus, operating hours, real-time traffic reports, special offers, and more.

Scorpion was named Top Interactive Agency for the 2017 MobileWebAwards competition. They received 17 awards, including: Best of Show Mobile Website, Best Small Business Mobile Website, Best Automobile Mobile Website, Best Professional Services Mobile Website, Best Health Care Mobile Website, Best Legal Mobile Website, Best Financial Services Mobile Website, Best Other Mobile Website, Best Fashion or Beauty Mobile Website and 9 Outstanding Mobile Website Awards.

Two organization were recognized with the Outstanding Mobile Interactive Developer for winning five or more MobileWebAwards. They are TMP Worldwide and TravelClick Inc.

A complete list of winners can be found on the award program’s Website.

The MobileWebAwards were judged on seven criteria seen as requirements for a success mobile website or mobile app. They include Creativity, Impact, Design, Content, Interactivity, Ease of use and Use of the medium. Each mobile website or mobile app entry is judged against other entries of the same format in its industry category and then against an overall standard of excellence.

The Best of Industry winners receive a statue reminiscent of a personal mobile device, it could be yesterday’s smart phone, today’s tablet, or tomorrow’s device.  It is crafted of fine jet black crystal with the iconic “W” accent in 24kt plated gold and personalized with your award information.  The award is entirely hand crafted by, Society Awards, the makers and designers of other notable award programs such as the Golden Globes, Emmys, MTV VMAs, and CLIOs to name a few, and presented in its own custom gift box.

The 2017 MobileWebAwards are sponsored by the following leading organizations: PR.com, EContent Magazine, iContact, SEO Inc, Webmaster Radio, and Website Magazine. The Web Marketing Association thanks these companies for their commitment to the entire online marketing community.

Posted on

Case Study: Attention To Detail Is The Name Of The Game At Algoworks

Algoworks recently won the 2017 WebAward for Outstanding achievement in Web Development presented by the Web Marketing Association (WMA). The competition was held in order to acknowledge the best web developers.

As the company was expanding the knowledge base and working on many new and different technologies, creating a website that could reach global clients was necessary. The idea was to create a site that was engaging, appealing and attractive, also, easy to browse through. A lot of thought process went into the making of such website which could gain us beneficial connections and noble clientele.

Throwing some light on one of the biggest challenges, Mr. Nauman Ahmad, Marketing Head at Algoworks remarked, “Algoworks services are unique in their own way. In the IT world, while most company websites work exclusively on mobility or CRM services or ECM or SPE services,the good thing is that we are unique, providing country’s finest services on such different domains all under one roof. But our first challenge in building the roadmap was to decide how to talk about our services on each domain, such that one’s presence does not underwhelm the service providing capabilities of the other besides the obvious challenge of completely different sort of audience it was meant to with each different technology.”

The technologies used by the developers were PHP and WordPress CMS for establishing the website. The team faced a lot of challenges at different levels of development stages while developing the website. Creativity was one department that was given the most freedom to get the best outcome. However, this was the only exception. Other involved departments underwent robust restructuring and planning to get an effective output to get the best laid-out implementation out in the market. The website boasts of unique design for each different page, respecting the theme and the content and disregarding the conventional one-theme website. Mr. Nauman commented, “The strategy was to cater to the audience in their language, than to try to impress someone in particular by the overall website. Irony, however, is that we did get rewarded anyways which confirmed our previously questioned belief that customer comes first, and if we respect that, the recognition indeed follows.”

Animations on the website required deep knowledge and understanding of the subject of the page including technologies being used. The primary challenge was for the designers to understand the technology. The secondary challenge was for developers to implement the planned animations efficiently by programming into website. Since animations require scripts which slow down website loading speed remarkably, the final and the most important challenge was to do it efficiently, subjecting website to rigorous optimizations at various levels.

Toward the end of the development phase, the website was subjected to rigorous testing, and automated scripts were implemented, some via tool and mostly custom written scripts to check the performance of the website and compatibility with the servers. From testing the site speed, to checking its code in all major browsers, compatibility on all the most popular and latest devices, Algoworks, testing lab with more than 70 devices was utilized for this project and it took a long time as a lot of corrections, updates, upgrades, and synchronization and operational settings were optimized on the backend as much as the efforts were spent in improving the UI/UX of the website. Having committed mistakes of not using the marketing guidelines of some of the technology products Algoworks works on, the technology leaders contacted and requested the team to re-align the website content, both textual and imagery, as per the guidelines of their marketing document. The team also had to launch very light themed, cleanly designed landing pages for ads, but before the final template was finalized, designers had had four rejected implementations on the grounds of ‘slow page loading times’, since landing pages are supposed to be super light and lightning fast than regular website pages. Note that these landing pages cannot be crawled and are orphan pages, hence you may not be able to browse them from www.algoworks.com.

As for the website challenges, the website designing unit had to consult the most experienced tech gurus in the company to help map a plan and re-align the efforts in the right direction to help the team cross the hurdles. They helped us pick the right plugins on the WordPress backend, helped customize and clean up the backend for a fantastic admin experience, and did a remarkable contribution in driving all forms fthe contact forms via single form, and recommending strategies for developers to get a high performance for the unique design of the website.

The end result, however, was achieved as planned and the praises by one and all seemed to confirm that the project was one of the most well planned and successfully executed projects. Mr Nauman concluded, “This is overwhelming. When we began to write the story for our website, we started right from the scratch and the route we decided to opt seemed not so conventional. Eventually, the journey to completion has been incredible, thanks to the unparalleled commitment of the creative bunch on one hand and our research specialists in the team on the other hand. Getting recognized by none other than WebAward is indeed an accomplishment and we would like to learn more from what the judges have as feedback besides the praise they have honored us with”.

The company’s co-founder and Director, who himself invested a lot of time personally into the making of the website, was thrilled to have won the 2017 WebAward, “A lot of creative thinking was gone into the making of our website as we wanted it to stand out, and it did. We are really glad and feel honored to receive such a prestigious award. Bagging the 2017 WebAward in the category “Best Information Services Website” has added a feather to our cap. I believe everyone at Algoworks is really proud of the commitment for perfection each and everyone involved has exhibited in the Marketing team.”