Rodent Regatta

ReUSEIT winners announced [Jeffrey Zeldman].

So, here’s the deal. A contest was held in which web designers and developers were asked to redesign a popular web site. There were entry rules. There was an entry deadline. There was a panel of judges. Oh yeah, there were sponsors and prizes, too!

As of yesterday, there were scores and winners.

Here’s what strikes me about all this. Ultimately, it was ”visual appeal” and ”useability” that differentiated the top-scoring designs from each other. Many folks got it right when it came to valid HTML and CSS, cross-browser functionality and accessibility.

Unless I’m misunderstanding this, the judging boiled down to winners distinguished from losers on the basis of the subjective scores. The objective scores were at the maximum for each of the award winners.

I’m hoping that Built For The Future, the site that put this contest together, will now conduct a contest that specifically focuses on sites built using Movable Type and the templates that reside ”behind the scenes” of Movable Type weblogs and web sites. For me, that would be as instructional as anything they could do.

I’d want the same rules to apply. Valid CSS and valid XHTML 1.0 or 1.1 would be essential.