We can’t help but get a little bit excited in Starfish HQ around web awards time – while the most important thing is always that our clients are happy with their sites and that their sites are successful, there’s something special about getting the recognition of our peers. Plus, the Starfish have a very casual dress policy most of the time, so the opportunity to glam it up for the black tie awards dinner and see the team in their shiny best is a lot of fun – it’s not quite the Oscars, but we do scrub up ok!

We snagged an award in the 2007 WA Web Awards for Best Small Business web site, for kendrake.com – a site that is sadly no longer visible, Ken having rebranded his business as Zoo Studio. This was the first year that we had entered and the competition was stiff, so we were pretty stoked with the outcome. We had finalists but no winners in 2008, and then last year – the first year that the awards program went national – we lifted our game and won Best Retail for Sophie Kyron’s online store. Given that we pride ourselves on our custom-written ecommerce platform, this was a pretty special award, not just for Levi who designed the site and Dave who built the product management system, but for the entire team.

The 2010 Australian Web Awards are opening soon, so now starts the arduous task at looking at all the web sites that we have launched in the last financial year and deciding which categories they belong in. We’d love to bring another shiny trophy back!