Zone: 0 captures its first award!
Sunday, 27th December 2009, 9:46pm (UTC), 5 Comments
Hope you're all enjoying the holiday season! The results are in for 2009's Sonic Site Awards, held by the Sonic Stadium, announced earlier this evening on their Sonic Hour radio show. Zone: 0 was nominated in four out of five categories, (the most frequently appearing site on the lists, which alone is worth boasting about!), and we won the best layout and design award, which I'm thrilled with! I must admit I did spend a lot of time carefully sculpting out this new look, I'm really pleased with it and in fact it's probably the nicest looking thing I've ever built! There's a certain ironic neatness to this as well, because I actually aimed to try and get the new look up and running in time for the 2008 awards, which never materialised - fortunate because it never would have been ready for them anyway! So I'm really happy about that, if I may say so, I think it's well deserved.

We came third in the Information Station award, fourth for community (more than fair - it's only really just sprung up and isn't a hive of constant activity) and, as it did in 2007, got the runner up prize for the Sonic site award itself! Who knew Sonic was quite so big in Brazil, eh? Smiley225 is already very kindly translating the site into German, maybe I should look into a Portuguese version as well, if that'll win more votes!

Still, regardless of any of that, I know those who voted really love the site and are often just as passionate about it as I am - I get emails and messages telling me as much on a fairly regular basis. Every time I read something nice about my work, it makes me think that every hour I've spent nudging objects on maps, rewording and rewriting paragraphs and carefully cropping images have all been so well worth it. So I thank all of you who have given your vote to Zone: 0 - I like to think that from many of you, each vote should carry double the weight, for all your enthusiasm and good wishes, but I guess that would be hard to calculate precisely :)

My sincerest thanks again to all who have voted, and to Dreadknux and the TSS team for organising the event and allowing us further exposure! Enjoy your New Year celebrations! See you in 2010.
Comments   5 Comments have been posted.
#1. Comment posted by Mercury on Monday, 28th December 2009, 8:13am
Congrats on the award! Knew you could do it!

Are they gonna have a little trophy picture or something that you can display on the site?
#2. Comment posted by LiQuidShade on Monday, 28th December 2009, 9:59am
Thanks a lot! Apparently, yes. I eagerly await it :)
#3. Comment posted by GreenBird on Monday, 28th December 2009, 3:04pm
Congratulations! Always knew this site was capable! Doing a wonderful job LiQuidShade, keep going at it! Looking forward to the Sonic and Knuckles section!
#4. Comment posted by MoDaD on Tuesday, 29th December 2009, 5:42am
This site isn't just great within the context of it being a Sonic site, but as an informational site as well. Everything is presented very professionally while still having all the charms of being a "fan site." The layout is really well done, too. A lot of other professional web designers could take some hints from you regarding how to successfully combine textual and visual data. If you don't mind me asking, what kind of frameworks do you work with to achieve all of this? (Content management system, javascript libraries, other tools, etc.)
#5. Comment posted by LiQuidShade on Tuesday, 29th December 2009, 10:43am
Thanks for your kind words MoDaD and GreenBird :)
Actually, other than lightbox for the occasional full sized images, and the Vanilla forum obviously, I haven't really used any pre-existing libraries. I think everything here is largely built from scratch, even my CMS. I kind of prefer things that way because learning how to build things myself is invariably more fun and less frustrating than trying to decipher how someone elses code is working and how to manipulate it. I like knowing about every part of my code and what it's doing. I also wasn't really quite so aware of what could have been at my disposal as I am now, and this was the first time I'd really used javascript in any significant way. In future I'd probably be more keen to save time and see what kind of pre-built features I could just throw in there, though my CMS is really specific for building level pages and I couldn't put up with a more general purpose one. I can add paragraphs and images to sections and then budge them around and resize them and it knows exactly what to do with the data that's being saved, and I really like the way that works. Shame no one else can see that part of it really!
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