WebbyAwards.gif (3265 bytes)The Best Of The Web

Awards time is here. No, it's not the "Oscar" , "Grammy" or the "Emmy" awards. It's the awards for the World Wide Web where they choose the 'best of the best' of the Internet. It's the "Webby Awards". And here are the nominees and winners which are catogarized into 15 categories.

  • Art/Design
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    HOME/EDUCATION
    HomeArts Chop from Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Country Living, and Popular Mechanics into bite-size chunks. Divide among six topic areas (health, relationships, food, pastimes, home, and garden). Add some online-exclusive features (Recipe Finder, InnFinder, HomeCare Advisor). Sprinkle with gratuitous Java tricks and serviceable search tools, serve in an extremely handsome design, and, voil‡, you've got HomeArts. Even if you aren't an obsessive Martha Stewart type, if you think a hammer and a screwdriver are pretty much interchangeable, if an Arch Deluxe is your idea of nouvelle cuisine, this site is still worth a long look.
    Cocktail Cocktail may not be the most exhaustive database of drink recipes available online, but it's certainly the best-written. Refer to the others for instructions on how to mix frat-house faves like the Bloody Snot. Cocktail is about such classic concoctions as the Old Fashioned and the Whiskey Sour. Besides recipes, you get each drink's history and suggested serving styles--all presented in a wry, literate tone that only occasionally spills over into HotWired-style haughtiness. And the classy should be Example 1 in a course on How to Use Frames.
    Britannica Online The online edition of the language's weightiest tome is everything you'd expect from the bookshelf standard, with some impressive interactivity to boot. All entries are searchable, and each has an appended list of related links from EB's Propaedia. It's multimedia-deprived, however, with only a few images and no sound files; but spend an hour with the random link function, and you'll be hooked. It's just so, well, encyclopedic.
    Toiletology 101 Stop giggling. You're a grown-up now and you should be able, at the very least, to fix your own toilet. This no-nonsense site tells you how a toilet works, what can go wrong, and what (if anything) you can do to fix it. The site is well organized and easy to navigate (love those forward/back arrows), with engaging text and excellent graphics.

    WINNER

    Family Planet

    		 You never think you need parenting advice until the little champ's cough suddenly propels breakfast all over your best suit. When you finally get to work two outfits later, log onto Family Planet, a crisply designed, embarrassingly complete parenting resource from Starwave. The crisply designed site has daily news, game ideas, chat areas for parents to share ideas, advice from experts (indexed by topic)-everything but the diapers. If anything, Family Planet suffers from a surfeit of information; and as a result, the colorful opening screen can be a bit intimidating at first. (Hint: The right-hand icons and the centered section headings are in fact the same.)