Actually the first award I received was a prize rather than an award. My site had been on the Net for about a month when CLEAR Net, my ISP, announced a competition for the “Best Personal Home Page”, the prize being a 56K modem. Although I knew I would be up against people using more sophisticated technology (such as JavaScript and fancy forms) than that available to me, I figured I had nothing to lose by entering: all it required was a brief visit to Clear’s site and nomination by email to Clear’s Webmaster. And the prize was really worthwhile, especially as my modem was not only second-hand (a gift from a friend) but also very slow: 14.4Kbps. I was completely nonplussed to learn that I had won this competition!

If you have your own home page I’m sure you’d like to win some awards. But please don’t steal awards from my page (or anybody else’s): the people who grant them are working hard, usually in their spare time, to make the Web a safer place for you to visit and have lots of fun, and those who win the awards work almost as hard to get them. Besides, you will be breaching copyright, which is against the law.

Instead, apply for over 100 awards with one simple form by clicking on the image at the top of this page.

As far as I know all my awards are genuine. If I have reason to suspect an award isn’t genuine I’m afraid I tell the award-givers what I think of them and refuse to accept the award. If I found the award on a special awards site I then email the site’s webmaster, explaining why the award is obviously not genuine, and the offender is expelled from the awards site. This might sound harsh to you but I feel it’s necessary to protect those who grant awards for the real purpose of web awards: a sincere desire to foster better web design.

If you don’t have a home page but would like one, see my HTML Writing Tutorial page for a few tips on web site design and to download a great tutorial to teach yourself HTML. Writing your own HTML code rather than using expensive web-creation software is much easier than it looks—and a lot of fun! Even if you don’t publish your page you will have something worthwhile to show your friends and family that you can proudly boast you did all by yourself.