The ISMS Award Scheme  - tips on site content

For an ISMS Award, content is everything. The nominated website must add value to the world wide web by containing something interesting, unusual, innovative, useful, educational, artistic or humorous and it must also be well written. The site content must be of such quality that visitors will want to come back again and again.

  • The site should contain at least 10 pages of good quality, original content, not including awards pages, chat rooms, guest books, FAQ pages and links to other sites.

  • For the ISMS, and many other award schemes, the site content must be in English - and it must be good English. Spelling and grammar count. Reading the ISMS web pages you may notice many words that appear to be misspelled, but generally they are used in the context of the ISMS objectives, that is they are generally 'isms'. In the corporate and other main text areas of our site the spelling and grammar are sound. Most award schemes, including ours, will allow variations in spelling due to language variations such as those between English, American and Australian.

  • The site must have a consistent theme throughout and one which is easily recognisable from the index or home page. Reviewers need to know almost immediately what your site is about.

  • The site must be family friendly and must not contain, for example, adult only, pornographic, hateful, hurtful, illegal, sexist or racist material - this list is illustrative and not exhaustive. Additional points may be awarded if the site has already received official recognition of site content, such as Family Friendly Site accreditation.

  • The site should contain a privacy statement explaining what the site policy is towards the people who visit it and who might, on occasions, disclose personal information through email, application forms or guest books. The privacy statement should also cover things such as what, if anything, the site policy is on information collected by your site from hit counters, polls and so on supplied by third parties. The statement should also contain a disclaimer relating to, for example, the availability, privacy policies and content of external web sites that can be accessed from your site.

  • If the site contains background music then visitors must have the option to turn it off.

  • The site must contain some detail of the updates that it has undergone. This does not necessarily have to cover every change in layout or content but it should show that the site is 'live' and undergoes regular house-keeping, improvement or development.

  • The site should not contain unnecessary and irritating popup windows that are not relevant to the host web site.

  • The site should not be merely a compilation of links to other sites - where is the originality in that? Nor should it just contain pages of advertisements for third parties.

  • The site should not steal bandwidth by linking images appearing on the site direct to the source of those images another sites. Most genuine webmasters consider this practice to be unethical. However, this may be unavoidable in some circumstances as this is often the way that some award schemes keep control over access to their award images.

  • The site should include a copyright statement, usually at the bottom of one page or, we would suggest, all pages. This could be as simple as:

    Copyright © your name or site name 1973-2005 All rights reserved

  • If you applying for awards then the site should contain an Awards page on which to display them. This will undoubtedly be one of the first pages that an award scheme reviewer will visit, just to see how the award will be displayed. There are various ways to compile an awards page but generally it will come down to either displaying each award graphic alone or displaying it with an accompanying text - either about the award itself or quoting the citation that accompanied it. There is no correct way, it just needs to fit with the site layout and style - and be well organised. It is courteous, but not always mandatory, to include a reciprocal link back to the awarding body's web site.

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© Copyright ISMS 1973-2005