SLU’s New Website Receives Interactive Media Awards’ Highest Honor
Saint Louis University’s new website has been named Best in Class in the University category – the highest honor bestowed by the Interactive Media Awards.
The Interactive Media Council Inc., a nonprofit organization of leading web designers, developers, programmers, advertisers and other web-related professionals, created the awards in part “to elevate standards of excellence in the internet.”
In her correspondence to SLU, Melanie Walker, a representative of the IMA, wrote that the award “represents the very best in planning, execution and overall professionalism. In order to win this award level, your site had to successfully pass through our comprehensive judging process, achieving very high marks in each of our judging criteria — an achievement only a fraction of sites in the IMA competition earn each year.”
Among the remarks, the judges called the website “magnificent.”
One judge wrote: “Excellent, high-quality, comprehensive content presented in an engaging, user-friendly manner. Elegant combination of photography, colors and typography. This site provides a large amount of information in a simple and appealing way, making it easy (and even enjoyable) to use.”
"Great attention to detail in terms of accessibility and web standards,” noted another judge. “This site scored a perfect 100 in accessibility and code quality tests. That is extremely rare, not just in the University category, but among all entries submitted... In terms of design, simply put, this site is a textbook example of the power of simple elegance."
SLU scored 494 points out of 500 possible points, earning:
- 96 points for design
- 100 points for content: 100
- 100 points for feature functionality
- 98 points for usability
- And 100 points for standards compliance
Jeff Fowler, SLU vice president of marketing and communications, said he was delighted to learn of the award and praised the marketing and communications team.
“We are thrilled to receive this recognition from the Interactive Media Awards and to hear such positive feedback from the judges,” Fowler said. “The marcom team worked very hard to ensure that we built a site that best represents Saint Louis University, and I am grateful for the effort, expertise and thoughtfulness our team continues to put into the new website.
“I’m also grateful to our partners, the web agency mStoner and our content management system provider Omni Update, for their commitment to building an outstanding site,” he continued. “And finally, I thank the SLU community — from ITS to our partners in divisions, colleges and schools — for their input and cooperation throughout the web redesign process.”