I was privileged and proud to be on the T3CON Jury this year, to help judge the TYPO3 awards website competition.

The jury members

The jury was made up of other experts in the web industry. Some from the TYPO3 community and some from the broader CMS domain. It was a great opportunity for me to rub shoulders with these other professionals.

  • Janus Boye, founder & lead of Boye & Company
  • Baddý Sonja Breidert, Drupal Association board chair, and CEO and co-founder of 1xINTERNET
  • André Kraus, TYPO3 Content Types team lead, and online marketing and web developer at GMK
  • Benjamin Mack, TYPO3 Core team lead, and CTO and co-founder of b13.
  • Phindiwe Nqanqaru, full stack developer and co-founder of BabesGotBytes

Jury

The judging

Spreadsheets FTW! 😁

There were five sites shortlisted across 13 categories. We had an initial meeting to discuss our approach, then we worked individually. Of course, I couldn’t evaluate the backend but I could definitely look at each site from a user’s point of view.

I created my own set of criteria and worked steadily through, visiting each website one by one. It was a significant time investment, but I wanted to do it justice because the clients and agencies had worked really hard on these projects, and the TYPO3 Community believed sincerely in the awards. The conference has an impact beyond TYPO3, and the awards are especially salient and necessary right now.

Among my criteria I needed a wildcard to cater for sites I just “liked” more than others. Does it spark joy? This helped me delineate the stand-outs (for me) in each category.

After the jurors had voted individually, we added all votes to a master spreadsheet and tallied up the results. We met again to discuss the results. It was interesting to see where we aligned and where we deviated from each other. Winners in each category clearly emerged.

It was a fascinating process and a true demonstration of the value of our differences. Above all, it was so cool to see the different ways that the TYPO3 CMS was used to create innovative sites with different functionality.

The winner

The overall winner was from the NGO category, Women for Women France.

What a deserving site to be named the TYPO3 Website of the Year! I was really pleased that the French agency behind the website, Talan Solutions, were recognized for their efforts and earned this award. Congratulations!

Image credit: Image used with permission from TYPO3 GmbH