ISITE Design Wins Webby Honoree

I was pleasantly surprised with an announcement that came my way today that one of the sites we launched last year, The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde government site, received a Webby Honoree Award.

If you aren't familiar with the Webby Awards, it's basically an eleven year old awards recognition given to the "worlds best websites." I like to think of it as the Oscars for websites, sans black-tie and short-lived acceptance speech. In this particular instance, we were awarded for the Government website category.

I was fortunate enough to have the priveledge of building this site last summer as a .NET 2.0 Ektron implementation for ISITE Design, the web design, development and interactive agency I work for. This site was made in part by the commendable efforts of a variety of team members at ISITE from many walks of the company including Creative, Project Management, Information Architecture, Development, Strategy, and Sales (in no particular order).

This project was particularly enjoyable to me, as it was not only a chance for me to get my feet wet while I was still new to the company, but to also experience one of the key staples of our company culture: the client relationship. Our primary stakeholder for Grand Ronde physically drove up to our Portland office from Grand Ronde, OR nearly every day for several weeks so that we could keep our communication lines crystal clear while I wrote code and he defined and entered content. This kind of high-touch vendor to client relationship has been something I've learned to really appreciate going into more recent projects, as it makes our job easier and also gives us the chance to really shine with the customer service factor.

If you haven't visited the Grand Ronde website before, I have to inject my shameless plug and recommend you check out the calendar feature. I had a blast building this AJAX calendar using .NET and integrating it with the Ektron CMS. I could go on for several more paragraphs describing it's coolness, but I'll spare you the boredom and simply encourage you to check it out for yourself.