The Webby Awards have been referred to as “the Internet’s highest honor” by the New York Times, and as “the index of success in the global new media scene” by The Guardian. With roughly 10,000 entries submitted this year, simply being nominated is quite an honor, but actually winning a Webby is a rare privilege indeed.
National Geographic received two Webby Awards! Belated but hearty congratulations to everyone involved!
The first Webby Award was in the “Magazine” category for National Geographic Magazine Online. They also won the People’s Voice Award in the same category! We’re very pleased to have helped National Geographic with their success. The ngm.com site has been our baby for the past year. After the launch of the new site, the number of unique people visiting the site went up by 500%. As well as a huge rise in regular visitor numbers, the content management system and caching we built for them also withstood massive traffic spikes from multiple features on Digg, MSN, and the New York Times.
We also helped to create Your Shot, which won National Geographic their second Webby Award for the best use of photography. Your Shot enables people to upload and store hi-res images, and create puzzles and wallpaper from the photos. Best of all, they can submit photos for possible publication in the National Geographic Magazine!
All of National Geographic’s success would not be possible without their brilliant team who worked with us at every stage. This is what they had to say about the work we did:
OmniTI has been fundamental to our success. Their depth of experience and unwavering commitment to quality, combined with a refreshing blend of innovative thinking and stellar support, have repeatedly provided us with rock-solid and scalable solutions, contributing substantially to the growth of our business.
~ Dave E. Smith, National Geographic.
We can’t thank Dave enough for his support and kind words. It was great working with him and his colleagues. On our side, we’d also like to give a special mention to Leon Fayer, Chris Schammel, Clinton Wolfe and Greg Chiasson who did exceptional work throughout.
We’re very proud to have National Geographic as one of our clients. More fantastic projects are coming to fruition in 2009. We’d love to share some of them with you, but you’ll have to wait until later in the year when all will be revealed!
Like National Geographic, more and more publications are concentrating on the Web. The Pulitzer Prize Board are supporting the trend. They recently announced that they will accept entries from online-only publications. We’d like to congratulate them on their decision — the evolution in traditional print media and online publishing is something we’re excited to be involved with. Here’s to more great work with National Geographic and other publishing clients in 2009!