Prettiest Site of the Year [1]
Internal competition for the prettiest site of the year.
Anything relating to nature gives a lot of opportunity to bring out beauty. The Ecological Society photo competition [2] clearly shows this as does Henry Gold's beautiful photos in the Colong Foundation for Wilderness site [3].
There were some very nice/professional graphic design jobs completed this year. MHC is one example that got a multi-format design treatment.
A MountainRiver CMS team members suggested YogaPass [4] as a beautiful site and it is - although we didn't design it ourselves. Accommodation sites Bower Cottage [5] and By Bondi Beach [6] deserve a special mention.
Graphical v Minimialism
2013 was a year of image heavy sites. The minimalist - let the content do its work application style interface letting people access the site quickly and efficiently definitely has its place. The DocDownload [7] theme under development does this beautifully.
Generally we built responsive sites this year. A big consideration in many sites was its ability to be viewed nicely on screen sizes from mobile size up to cinema size and be touch friendly. I am not sure this is a win for democratisation of the web [8] and it is certainly only skin deep.
Flowing Layout
We have worked on interlated.com.au [9] to develop a 'flowing theme' - still working on it.
We didn't come up with a quorum. We had 4 results, 1 not ours and in the end the coin came up heads 3 times in a row. Rikki votes for Bower Cottage Accommodation [5] as a lover of bower birds, Martin says the Ecological Society of Australia [10] is impossible to beat and John is voting for Kinaba [11]. The Nature shots are great and we think it is a nice example of an image intensive site. Kinaba
