A story never told— The founding of the FWA, the largest online award program.
For this exclusive interview I had the chance to sit down with FWA founder Rob Ford.
The FWA (Favourite Website Awards) was founded in early 2000 and since then has been grown into the largest online award program, serving millions of creatives with inspiration & professional recognition.
Hey Rob!
Stoked to have the honor doing this unique interview with you. As a founder of the famous FWA award program you’ve been at the core and played a big part in our web industry from the very beginning.
I believe everyone who knows the FWA award, or even received one over the last couple years knows the impact of the work you’ve been doing.
I know that you usually try to stay behind the camera, but today I’d like to bring you a bit more into the spotlight and talk about the FWA.
What was the path you took and how/why did you end up founding the FWA award? Give us a little bit of background.
Hey Tobias,
Thanks for asking me to do this interview.
Well, how far back shall we go?
My first coding/computer experience perhaps? That would be the original Rubik’s cube back in 1977, when I was eight.
A friend showed me one piece of code, that would enable me to solve any cube. I can still do it to this day but can take me a bit longer than it used to. In fact, I still have my original Rubik’s cube on a shelf above me right now.
I became massively jealous of anyone with a Spectrum ZX81 in 1982 and would befriend anyone I could just to have a play with it. I finally got my very own computer in 1982, for Christmas, it was a Commodore Vic 20.
My brother and I, together with the help of my mum who was a super fast and efficient typist, sat for hours typing in lines of code from a book so that we could play our first ever computer game. We typed in “Run” and saw a list of line input error messages. We got it running in the end but I will always remember the adrenaline rush as we hit “return”, even though it failed to run due to the errors.
“I endured school but hated it. Always rebelled but got the work done.”
I endured school but hated it. Always rebelled but got the work done. My brother went to university, I didn’t. He became a stockbroker, driving a 911 Porsche whilst I went from good to bad… first working at a bank as a management trainee, then as a foreign exchange teller for American Express, then as a car salesman from where I would found my first company.
In 1989 I co-founded a company called Nimrod Vehicle Location. We would use the power of networked computers to allow people to find the car they were looking for. Everybody laughed at us or gave us a blank look when we pitched to them. I guess we were too early with this idea.
After I burnt myself out in car sales, my mind was opened by the acid house and rave scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s in the UK. It was at this point that I totally went off the rails and had interest in nothing other than my mates, music and raving in fields, marquees and warehouses, up and down the country and would often end up at the legendary Sterns nightclub in Worthing, where the likes of Carl Cox, Grooverider, Sasha and many more could be seen and heard for the first time by many.
I went from driving brand new sports cars, whilst I was one of the best car salesmen in the South, to driving a £50 orange Mini (how I LOVE the internet, I just found my Mini, restored online!), with rusted floor, wide wheels at the back and a pair of 100 watt speakers on the rear parcel shelf. I ended up doing all sorts of random jobs including hay bailing, which was a physical killer! I’d also tried my hand as a Swatch watch dealer, buying Swatch watches from jewelers and selling them out of a bag on the Portobello Road in London.
“My mates and I were all heading towards our thirties and
realizing that we needed real jobs now…”
As many of them, now hitched/married, had real jobs and were back in suit and tie, I just couldn’t do it and found refuge in my parents’ spare room on my dad’s first PC, a Windows 95 Time computer.
It accessed the internet, which was a first for me, via a 33.6 K modem.
The whole PC experience was a shocker at the time but it gave me a flavour of the web.
I’d gone from meeting people in laybys to swap floppy disks loaded with Amiga 500 games pulled from bulletin boards to now having the world at my feet… the www.
Having spent far too long downloading free screen savers, I soon got bored and decided I wanted to create my own webpage, I wanted to be a webmaster. So, I downloaded a manual on designing a webpage in HTML and used up all the ink in my dad’s printer. I was now able to create amazing websites, loaded with animated gifs, a virtual creature (a tarantula) and some lake applets… not forgetting the flashing neon “open 24 hours” sign.
Then, one day I happened to look at the website for my local builder’s merchant and, it was actually very impressive. So, I copied all of the code… in fact I copied the whole thing but quickly started to change it and evolve it into my own thing by creating my own buttons with some free graphics software.
I became more and more frustrated by how difficult HTML was. I had ideas but I just couldn’t realize them very well. Then, in 1999 two years after I started trying to design websites, my best mate showed me the website for this guy’s company that he was working for who was doing events. Immediately I was captivated by what I was looking at. The site had moving images and was doing some crazy animations.
The intro page talked about a new software, Flash. Game over, I was immediately addicted and went home to download a free 30 day trial of this software.
Over the following months I created a lot of websites under my new company name, treecity (all lower case as lower case was the future. Treecity because I had a collection of over 500 trees in 3 inch pots, all grown from seed). My http://www.treecity.co.uk/ was complete in early 2000 and, as I surfed the web, I started to see some websites that had won internet awards. I applied for one, The Golden Web Award and won within about 10 minutes (I later realized that this happened to everyone).
However, I got a buzz from winning and started searching and applying for other internet awards. I was winning loads of them and was loving the feeling of positivity. I also started to design Flash websites for companies but have to be honest and say I didn’t really enjoy that… just give me more awards.
Then, on 17th April 2000, I received this email:
“Congratulations! someone has nominated your site for a Yell Award! If you would like to ‘Yell’ about this, feel free to use the following icon image and code on your site — please first replace the question mark in the code with the appropriate location of the icon image within your site.”
I was on a massive natural high!
Four weeks later:
We are the PR agency for Yell UK Web Awards and you have been nominated in the Best Web Site for Entertainment. You are through to last two stages of the nomination process. You will be notified by Yell.com if you are through to the final stage. Please would you be able to send me a quote about being nominated.
And then:
Congratulations! Your site has been shortlisted for the Yell Awards and an icon recognising this is available for display on your site
All shortlisted sites will soon be evaluated by our judging panel of new media industry specialists.
Representatives of the sites selected by the judges will be invited to the Gala Award Ceremony, hosted by Jonathon Ross, on 11th July 2000 at the London Studios, SE1.
In a bizarre way, I was relieved to have not made it any further as the thought of having to turn up to such a huge event scared the heck out of me. I eventually lost out to timeout.com which I could live with.
However, the huge amount of buzz and positivity I felt was incredible and I’d now become an integral part of the world of internet awards and was a bit of a player in the internet awards community at that time, judging for some of the World’s Top Awards and being a board member on an awards rating site (maybe we need something like that again, today).
I soon realised that the existing awards community was all about people jostling for positions in online communities with little interest in finding amazing web work. For me, I couldn’t get enough of cool web work and nearly all the good stuff being published online was made with Flash. Hanging around cool sites forums like Flashkit, were-here, Ultrashock, Flashmove etc, I never missed a cool Flash site launch.
I became disillusioned by the awards community especially how they were stuck in a world of exam-like scoring for websites. So, now feeling very experienced in this arena and a new blood, I set about shaking things up and started my own award programme… Treecity Favourite Website Awards.Very quickly this evolved into Favourite Website Awards and sat on its own .com.
My focus was to showcase the work and get away from points scoring and crazy sets of criteria. With my new famous or even infamous orange and yellow version, which almost gained cult status in later years, things really started to take off.
With only 600 visitors in its first month, I started to find new communities to spread the word and it was the legendary Pixel Surgeon back then who gave the site its first real break by posting the latest version of the FWA orange and yellow site, now with crisp pixel fonts and a swanky new Flash intro created by David Martin at Fantasy Interfaces (in fact, the new intro also gave me a new FWA ONE logo, a logo that would later see me receive a cease and desist from MTV Networks, which was not a good day. Ironically, some years later an MTV website would adorn the new FWA yellow award ribbon), on their design news stream.
As I launched FWA, in May of 2000, I was 30 years of age. Little did I realize that I would be 40 years of age before I had another day off or holiday as I spent the next ten years in solitary confinement in my parents’ spare room running FWA 24x7x365, even Christmas Day, even when ill as the site had no automated processes and had to be updated every day.
Tobias: I love your unusual path to start the FWA and it seems like you took a huge personal risk to fully focus on the FWA.
At what point did you decide to take this thing you had full time and make a living off of it? Was there a turning point?
Yes indeed it was an unusual path. It was a path I never planned. Things just evolved organically due to my passion for the medium. I was financing everything from my savings. Web hosting was a nightmare and expensive and I spent ages trying to find a sponsor (actually, I am always trying to find financial support for something at FWA!).
Nobody was interested at this time, even though in later years and still up to this day, I receive emails from web hosts asking to sponsor thefwa.com. Thanks to Jared Wray and CenturyLinkCloud, the site has had rock solid hosting for the last 10 years.
Back on point… yes, there was a tipping point which created a business out of FWA by default. Let me take you back and run you through how that came about…
As the site managed to get shout-outs on other legendary portals, after the Pixel Surgeon shout-out, the momentum grew and I soon distanced myself from the old awards community who were busy fighting amongst themselves over award ratings. I was on a roll and the site of the moment, Newstoday, had an incredible feature, allowing you to add your own news to the site. I was quick to plug Favourite Website Awards as much as possible and realized that you can overdo this, with a few Newstoday users letting me know about it.
“My tough car salesman skin enabled me to take their insults personally but not let them put me down, only making me strive for even more exposure and success.”
In June of 2000, the first full month for site submissions to Favourite Website Awards, the site received thirty one submissions. I’ve never been one to sit on my laurels and I was active on all the cool sites forums and sites like Linkdup, and BestFlashSites.de trawling for the best websites of the day. I’d then set about inviting people to submit for a FavouriteWebsiteAward and being one of the so-called World’s Top Awards, gave a lot of credibility to my request.
This consistent approach and my addiction to finding the most cool Flash sites of the day, meant that I was able to have an awards website that featured one amazing Flash website every day of the year. It became addictive but it was a healthy addiction.
Submissions mushroomed and by April 2005 I was receiving over fifteen hundred submissions per month. Yes, more and more submissions, the number of submissions became a huge focus but I soon realised I was spending almost every hour of the day clicking on submitted links and trying to make sure I didn’t miss anything cool being posted on the forums. During this time, I think I knew every Flash website that was worthy of attention being launched on the web.
With my years of experience I was able to quickly suss out if a site was worthy of an award or not but I was struggling, big time.
In 2006, I was interviewed for the Korean web magazine, w.e.b. and in that interview I said that submissions to FWA were free and that they would always be that way, as it was important to me that the best work had the chance to submit, regardless of their finances. It was of paramount importance to me that young designers had as much chance of getting showcased on FWA as the big brands.
“…I was thinking of introducing a submission fee for FWA. No other award
sites were doing this, apart from those with live events…”
However, the crippling amount of submissions hit a tipping point and I called a meeting with my dad, the only sounding board I had. I walked from the spare room in my parent’s house, where the shared computer was and told my dad that I was thinking of introducing a submission fee for FWA. No other award sites were doing this, apart from those with live events, like The Webby Awards. He said, “go for it”. After all, what did I have to lose. I knew this would be a way to get back my life as well as being a way to finally put some money back into the massive deficit of my savings account.
In May 2006, I pushed the button and changed the submission forms on site, now there was a £10 GBP submission fee for all submissions. The shit hit the fan.
Within hours of posting the new forms the community was raging. People were having heated discussions on many forums, like Ultrashock and emails started to hit my inbox, almost immediately.
“WTF is this 10gbp for site submission. Are you out of your mind. If there was no designers and agencies submitting sites and linking from their work to FWA you wouldn’t be what you are today. So take this shit down and put a banner up.”
Suddenly, my inbox was awash with hate mail and, worst still, no submissions. Before I added the payment submission form, I would regularly be able to hit send/receive at any time in the day and have a new submission. Now, all I was getting was abuse, even from some people I knew, even though their abuse was politer.
I held firm, I had to after all, unless I wanted to remain a slave to my self-inflicted system. Then, the submissions began to trickle through and in the first full month of paid submissions, the numbers had dropped from over fifteen hundred per month to a massive eighty one.
I knew I’d taken a gamble but it had paid off. I’d also taken a bullet for every web award in the world as they could now roll out paid submissions if they wanted to.
This was when FWA became a viable web business.
The gamble definitely paid off and I’m sure the FWA inspired many other awards to follow in the last 15 years.
And to add to that point: Do you feel the award industry in itself changed much since you started in early 2000?
The biggest change happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The internet awards community in the late nineties was vibrant but it was out of touch. All the top awards had a scoresheet for judging submissions. When judging for other awards, I’d have to go through a list of one hundred points to score each site I judged.
It took forever and I soon realized that I could judge a site without even needing a score sheet. Experience gives you the ability to know very quickly if a website is good enough to win an award and very soon I was ignoring the scoresheet and just giving each submission I judged a score out of one hundred. This also enabled me to judge a huge amount of websites very quickly.
The nineties awards community were pretty old skool, stuck in their ways and loving the spotlight on themselves. I’d become one of the secret members of Awards Sites who judged other awards and rated them. It was all getting a bit cult like. Someone I judged for emailed me to say they had been offered five million dollars sponsorship for their awards. For a split second I believed what I was reading but quickly realized I had to change the way awards were running.
At the turn of the Millennium, you had two types of internet awards, there were those run by individuals who had random hobbies, were dog breeders etc.
“Seriously, I can remember a top rated web award run by a couple
who were breeders of Dandie Dinmonts.”
If you won their award, the icon they sent you had a picture of their dogs on it. If you go to http://www.treecity.co.uk/home.html and look at my “awards won” you’ll see some incredible award icon designs from the late 90s and early 00s. I think I won over 500.
It was addiction due to the challenge of winning the “Superb 400”, an award for winning over 400 rated awards. Amazing thing is I don’t even feel embarrassed to admit that!! I know I should.
The other type of award were the big award shows, like the Yell UK Web Awards and the Webby Awards. These bigger shows were not that well known back then, in fact internet awards were very low on people’s radar as most people were just discovering the web.
Showcases like Macromedia Shocked Site of the Day, Macromedia Site of the Day, and Yahoo Pick of the Day, were some of the most sought after yet these showcases were often littered with very average work and would soon lose credibility.
Something I learnt quite quickly was that people like to win, not come second. There was a time when there was a Gold FWA and a Silver one as well. Some loved to “win” a Silver “Approved” FWA whilst others were not happy. Again, fallout from the old awards community where they had tiered awards.
What I did with FWA was make sure only the best work was showcased and that was quite easy for me to do as I was the only one involved in the FWA process. In fact I was the only judge for at least 6 years. Nowadays we have over 85 judges for the daily awards and around 100 for the yearly award.
In some ways, I feel like a bit of a trailblazer with internet awards. I have seen so many come and go in the last ten years and I have also seen many mould themselves on FWA, often mirroring our processes. There have been plenty of times where I’ve had to contact new awards when they have copied design elements and even content from our site.
There was a site from China called thesos.net which took all of our content and displayed in the same way but just tweaked the colours of our site from 2005. There was even a time when someone created an FWA template and was effectively selling our site for $15 USD a pop.
Still, there is a massive distinction between the big award shows like Cannes and the daily award showcases like FWA. The reality is that Cannes has huge budgets to play with and generates millions through very high submission fees when FWA just about keeps its head above water, often begging and borrowing.
“One of my frustrations with other daily award sites is their lack of imagination and innovation. If I were to start a new award, it would have to be different to what was already out there.”
After all, how many times do you want to see a Site of the Day award winner? The same site on a different showcase.
After five years with our current website, we’re just in the process, with the amazing team at Hello Monday, of completely rebooting the whole FWA presence. Expect to see that late 2015 or possibly early 2016.
Our current site has been a bit of a burden to carry…
After five months and thousands of emails, we launched the all new FWA website on March 1st 2010. As monitors were getting bigger and bigger, we went for 1280 pixels wide as the standard for the site.
In April 2010, just a month after our launch, the iPad was launched and gave me three headaches… big ones… migraines in fact! The previous version of the FWA website was all about small thumbnails and the site would scale to your monitor size. With the new FWA v3 we went big with images and everything else for that matter as I felt the industry was getting bigger and bigger, with massive monitors etc. Bad mistake on my part as the industry was just about to take a massive change in direction… mobile.
Then came the upper cut from Steve Jobs (R.I.P.) when he published his Thoughts on Flash (https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/). In one article, Steve delivered a silver bullet to Flash and it very quickly became the leper of the web, with Adobe doing little to try and shore it up.
So, there I was, the biggest financial investment of my life, with a massive website, made almost completely in Flash that would not work on an iPad, nor on an iPhone. To top things off, a torrent of abuse came my way, via social media and emails.
“Greetings, your new website is a total disaster. The old one was simpler and that was the reason why everyone loved your website. I bet submissions are not as much as it used to be. Who was the bonehead that designed it?”
I tell you what though, when you are reading negativity towards your own work it hurts but the feeling you get is worse when you agree with what people are saying. In a nutshell, I called things wrong and for a man who spends his entire day keeping up to speed on what’s cutting edge, I was completely embarrassed.
Due to the investment of time and money, I had to sit things out, which wouldn’t be easy especially as FWA had been awarding Flash sites, almost exclusively, for ten years. It would take a further year of proactively finding amazing HTML websites to showcase before people realized that the F in FWA did not stand for Flash.
The new website quickly went on to pay for itself and gave me so much more time that I could look at developing ideas in other areas, like the FWA Mobile showcase.
Going full circle here, maybe it’s time for some sort of awards rating system again, to help people find the most respected awards easier, rather than trawling through one showcase after another.
In a way, the current awards arena is much like it was back in the 1990s, full of very similar award showcases. Maybe we need some new blood to come in and shake things up like I did 15 years ago.
Let’s talk a little bit about the future.
Considering FWA’s size and growth over the last couple years it seems to me & many others like a next logical step to create a “live event” similar to other award shows in a physical space — I’m sure you have considered this, but what are your thoughts on it?
There is, indeed, huge interest for us to do an event. Shawn Pucknell (FITC) has been on to me for many years, as have others.
There are two reasons why this hasn’t happened yet…
Firstly, there are a lot of conferences out there. Many of these are almost identical, with the same people doing the same speeches/presentations. Not that there is anything wrong in doing a tour of the world with the same presentation but the thought of doing an FWA conference or event that features people on a stage presenting work to an audience sat in chairs, does nothing for me or for what FWA stands for.
In the 1980s a night out was all about hitting the pub, many alcoholic drinks and then squaring off in a dodgy disco somewhere, where women danced around their handbags and men oggled on from the sides. It was also a time when violence on the terraces at football matches was rife as well.
As acid house music took hold in the late 80s in the UK, and the rise of illegal raves, everything changed. The atmosphere at these early raves was incredible. Everyone was united, no matter what colour or creed you were or what your background or location was. Violence at football matches vanished almost overnight as well.
Even though that will most likely sound very random, my point is that for us to do an FWA event, it would need to be game changing. I’d want people to be leaving their first FWA event as I did my first rave… a new and unforgettable experience that set the standard for a generation.
Hey, maybe if we do an FWA event, we should set up a secret location, meet at a motorway service station and convoy to it. Event starts at midnight and runs to 6am? Oh… and no seating. ;)
Secondly, another big reason why this hasn’t happened yet is down to resources and budget. Whilst big brands love to spend millions putting up not so love able pop stars and celebrities on stage for their new product/service launch, they are not so keen to spread budget love to projects like FWA. Whilst FWA is known all over the world, it’s still run the same way it always has been, with myself running everything in the background and a mighty superb and dedicated team of over 100 daily judges.
An FWA event will happen one day, but only when the stars have aligned and the idea is right.
I absolutely agree with you, it’s hard to do an event that is different and most events are very alike, so you don’t want to add more noise to it.
One last important question: You’ve been reviewing & awarding interactive experiences since 15 years now. If there is one person to ask about advice for winning an FWA award, it’s probably you.
Any secrets for us & other designers to share?
This is quite an easy one to answer for me. Over the years, the most meteoric rise in fame has come from individuals who were experimental and/or future thinking.
“Some people think you need a big budget to create an award winning project or win an FWA. This is so untrue.”
It’s the individuals with a passion who have the most power out there.
So, get experimental, make something and break it… see what crazy results you might get from breaking your code.
And, most importantly, show your personality.
Over the years the most memorable sites have come from relatively unknowns, with some examples here:
In 2002, the unknown Who’s We Studios took the web by storm, flexing some big personality.
In 2003, the unheard of tokyoplastic literally swallowed us up with their new direction of work.
In 2004, Dan Noe, showed us how to do personality on a website as did Jeff Vermeersch in 2008.
And, then, of course, the simplest ideas are always winners as well, as demonstrated here by North Kingdom in 2005.
If I can just finish up by saying that creativity on the web took a huge hit in 2010 after Steve Jobs’ Thoughts On Flash. Agencies and brands ran for cover and went so safe that we had almost 5 years of one page scrolling websites, not forgetting 5 years of Facebook brand Pages.
Thankfully, things have pretty much gone full circle now as we are seeing more and more progressive work in the browser now, without the need for a plug-in and it’s equally exciting that this level of progressiveness has finally made its way to the mobile browser as well.
Yes, micro-sites are making a comeback!
Rob, thank you SO MUCH for participating in this interview and sharing the full story of the FWA.
I’d say we talk again in 15 years. Until then, please keep inspiring us with your work. I’m a huge fan of the FWA, and I’m not the only one.
Thank you,
Tobias
_
This interview was conducted by Tobias van Schneider
for Semplice, the portfolio platform for creatives.
