FWA: Had me, lost me.

For a while, The FWA was the site for the best web design out there. If you wanted the biggest, the flashiest, the sexiest - you went there. Where did they fall off the bus?

Right around the time they started charging to submit sites. I don't begrudge them - they probably have a pretty hefty bandwidth bill, tons of links to sift through and almost no advertising on the site. However, this had the effect of preventing small companies and individuals from submitting the types of sites that made FWA so interesting, skewing FWA towards corporate sites: companies like Ikea, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, Dupont, and large government-funded organizations make up the bulk of current FWA picks.

This isn't the problem - good work should be recognized, whether it's a little art project you've been doing on the site, or a multi-million dollar website.

But should a site like http://bravia.sony.eu/bravia.html have actually won an award? It's slow to navigate, requires loading between each section, and is not visually exciting or distinctive. Did it win because it's a Sony site? How about the website for Assassin's Creed? Five frames per second of non-interactive video is what it takes to get you an award? Well, at least it looks pretty (oh wait - 90% of what you see is game footage, not design).

We have a site about Montreal Tourism which requires a huge preloading time before you can even navigate between the sections, and once you're in the site, is utterly unresponsive. Today's site for Animal Logic looks nice, is easily navigable, and doesn't have brutal load times - but it's unremarkable.

And to add insult to injury, they added 2Advanced (sorry, they don't deserve the link) to their Hall of Fame list. 2A is responsible for some of the greatest sins against responsible use of Flash, typography, and ease-of-use in modern web design.

Sadly, it's not just FWA. Everything in web design lately has been pushing towards either super minimal sites with few design elements, AJAX sites that want to mimic desktop apps (with worse performance), or huge Flash video sites that push bandwidth and performance to their limits (while allowing only limited interactivity).

Where are the sites that excited us a couple years ago?