The community expects that prestigious awards programmes have a high level of transparency, impartiality, and fairness, as well as setting exceptionally high benchmarks for the industry to follow and aspire to. To ensure that the WAWAs meet these expectations, the judging chairperson follows a set procedure for the judging.

Each category in the awards is judged by a subset of the judges, depending on their individual backgrounds, the number of judges and the number of entries in each category. For example, in previous years where there were four judges, most categories were evaluated by three of the four.

For each site:

1. Judges score websites using one score sheet per category. There are 8 criteria and each criterion is scored out of 10 (10 being the best).
2. The allocated weightings are applied to each of the criteria in the different categories. Weightings total 100%, with the formula criteria score * weighting.
3. Each website is totaled to give the Judge’s weighted score for each website.
4. Judges scores were averaged for each website.
5. The highest average weighted score is the winner, the next 2 (or more) highest are the Finalists.
6. The Most Outstanding Website winner is decided by the judging panel in conjunction with the judging chair after the winners of each category has been determined.

An example of weightings allocated to criteria for the Business category using last year’s Judging Criteria:

fitness for purpose = 20%
design aesthetics = 10%
content and home page = 20%
usability design = 10%
standards and accessibility = 20%
development = 10%
functionality and accuracy = 5%
credibility and validity = 5%

The weightings are very important to the final result. In fact, because the judging chairperson takes the individual score sheets from each judge and applies the final math to come up with the results, even the judges don’t know who the winners are until the very end of the process (although sometimes a clear winner will be obvious to them).

The end result is that the judging process is a definite structured scientific process. However, as with all competitions, the judges’ decision is final, and the individual score sheets will not be made available to the public.