MEMBERS' RESOURCE AREA - LOGIN

MEMBERS' RESOURCE AREA - JOIN

Do you want to reach the thousands of amdramers who visit this site every month? Contact us for details of how to have your organisation associated with amdram.co.uk

Amdram Groups Website Competition

and the Winner is...

	The 2002 Pravda Award Awarded to 'the most informative Amdram Group website'
Competition was fierce, with 23 nominations whittled down to a short-list of five (South London Theatre, Broadbent Theatre, Rackheath Players, B.R.O.S. Musical Productions and East Kilbride Rep Theatre Club). The short-listing process was a matter of the opinion of the judge and there were a number of excellent sites just outside the cut (notably Adlington Music and Arts Society, Thurrock Operatic Society (TOPS), Sudbury Dramatic Society, Grosvenor Light Opera Company and Henley-on-Thames Amateur Operatic Dramatic Society)
and the winner of the 2002 Pravda award for the most informative Amdram Group website is...
Pravda Winner

	The Cabaret Award Awarded to the most entertaining Amdram Group website
Entertainment is, of course, entirely subjective. In a web site, it's about the content and the presentation of the content - whether it's reviews of shows, pictures of people making fools of themselves (actors, darling) or on-line games, it's the stuff that makes visitors come back to the site. There is a wide variety of ways of doing this. Amongst the many strategies adopted by the short-listed sites, Grosvenor Light Opera Company includes a recipe on its discussion board, Chameleon Players has a quirky obsession with tea, and insults its members in some style, Drama Unlimited includes photographs of production "out-takes", The Cuddington Players site contains a great depth of material about their shows and South London Theatre includes some simple but effective interactivity.
and the winner of the 2002 Cabaret award for the most entertaining Amdram Group website is...
Cabaret Winner

	The Rocky Horror Wooden Spoon Awarded to the Amdram Group website with the worst sense of chronology
One of the peculiarities of the Internet is persistence. Once a search engine finds your site, it will always find it. You have permanent publicity, even when your product is stuck in a time warp. And the Internet is a window on your group. An out of date web site says something about the ethos of the whole society, whether it deserves it or not.
and the winner of the 2002 Rocky Horror wooden spoon for the Amdram Group website with the worst sense of chronology is...
Chigwell Row Operatic & Dramatic Society
A visitor to the CRODS site is invited to their next show, Ray Cooney's "It Runs in the Family" at Victory Hall, Chigwell, 4th to 7th October, 2000. They are hereby awarded a wooden spoon and an invitation to stir up their site!

	The Fur Coat and no Knickers Wooden Spoon Awarded to the Amdram Group website with the flashiest exterior and the scantiest foundations
Visitors to a web site make a trade-off between patience and reward. Is the reward of finding the content worth the time it takes to find it? The sites nominated in this category are judged to have got the balance wrong. The issues vary from 'a URL but no web site' (publicity before product) to various excesses of visual noise (a lot of which comes from 'free' service providers throwing pop-up ads onto the screen).
and the winner of the 2002 Fur Coat & No Knickers wooden spoon for the Amdram Group website with the flashiest exterior and the scantiest foundations is...
Stagefright Drama Group
Stagefright is basically a site with a good deal of interesting and useful content. It was originally nominated in this category for the slowness of its calendar, however it also exhibits a variety of other problems. The host uses the site as free advertising space and throws pop-up adverts all over the place. The front page displays a series of buttons (probably host adverts) when it first loads. These are subsequently over-written by the rest of the page, but the "site page" is a different site to the "host page", so bits of buttons remain poking out of the top right hand corner. At some resolutions, in some browsers (the usual site designer's nightmare), bits of the page over-write each other. The front page takes an age to load, partly because of design, partly because of all the other things happening. All this spurious technology gets in the way of the user's enjoyment of the website.

Okay, so that's the end of the competition....
This competition was run
(a)	So that we could all have some fun and
(b)	So that the theatrical webmasters amongst us (myself included) can learn from our brethren
I have made several changes to the CATS web site as a result of what I've learned. I hope everyone else found it interesting, helpful, or at the very least mildly diverting!
The competition rules are printed below, for anyone still interested - particularly in rule 17.
All that remains is for me to notify the winners of their prizes, then I can happily get back to writing Robin Hood and the Singing Nun...
Stuart Ardern (Lazy Bee Scripts and Colbury and Ashurst Theatrical Society)

Competition Rules
1.	Nominated sites must appear in the Amdram Groups Database
2.	Anyone may nominate a site. (Vain Webmasters may even nominate their own pages.)
3.	All nominations must be made by e-mail to Lazy Bee Scripts (by clicking the nomination links in the competition page)
4.	You may nominate any number of sites for a particular award, but nominations should be restricted to one category per e-mail.
5.	Nominations should include the name of the group, the URL of the site and (briefly) why you wish to nominate it.
6.	All nominated sites will be listed in the competition page
7.	Comments from nominations may be included in the competitions page, but contributions will be quoted anonymously (not least to save the embarrassment of webmasters who praise their own sites)
8.	Nominations will close on 14 June 2002.
9.	A shortlist of up to 5 nominated sites in each award category will be chosen by the competition organiser and published in the competition page of the Amdram site
10.	Sites managed by the competition organiser may be nominated in any category (and will appear in the nominations lists for appropriate praise or pillory), but will not be shortlisted
11.	Any visitor to the Amdram site may vote for one of the shortlisted sites in each of the award categories. The award will be made to the site receiving the largest number of votes.
12.	Voting will be by e-mail only (via links on the competition page)
13.	Persons attempting to rig the competition by making multiple votes may be smeared in honey and staked out over an anthill
14.	Voting will close on 28 June 2002
15.	The winners will be announced, via the Amdram site, as soon as possible after the close of voting
16.	The competition organiser will find suitable, and above all small, prizes. The main prize will be the ability to boast about the award on your web site.
17.	Nobody should take this too seriously (no tearful acceptance speeches if you win, no legal action if you lose)
18.	Anybody reading this far in the list of rules should consider whether or not they have anything better to do

Copyright ©2003. All Rights Reserved.

Events | Groups | Notices | Services | Sponsors
About Us | Front Page | Contents | Terms of Usage and Privacy Policy