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The Contest is now over. No more entries will be accepted.

Va students are invited to participate in a two-phase contest to design the best Web site for a department of the UVa School of Engineering or the Virginia Engineering Foundation (VEF), which is sponsoring the competition and awarding a total of $2,000 in cash prizes to winning design teams.

Aside from the cash prizes, additional software prizes (Visual C++, Visual J++, Visual Basic, and Front Page) will be donated by the Microsoft Corporation, who is co-sponsoring this contest.

• Dean's Office
• Applied Mechanics
• Biomedical Engineering
• Chemical Engineering
• Civil Engineering
• Electrical Engineering
• Engineering Physics
• Materials Science
• Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering
• Systems Engineering
• The Virginia Engineering Foundation

The design criteria, further described below, will include content, presentation, aesthetics, graphics, depth, usefulness, and ease-of-use.

Students may form their own teams, subject to approval by the contest coordinators, and individuals may volunteer to to be assigned to a team that will best benefit from their skills and interest. Each team may request a specific departmental Web site to work on, and students are encouraged to request assignment to the department that represents their major field of study (although this isn't a requirement).

Teams will work closely with the departments / organizations, and coordinate with the respective faculties / staffs in order to insure the accuracy, completeness, and appropriateness of the site content. Ideally, the resulting designs should be so good, that the respective departments will be happy to adapt these designs as their official WWW pages; indeed we hope that this will be the case with many of the designs (contest submissions will therefore become the property of the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Virginia Engineering Foundation).

Contest participants are encouraged to review the pages of the Department of Computer Science design examples, ideas for content, presentation, and aesthetics (this site has undergone a major renovation over the last year).

Other examples of nice aesthetic WWW site presentations include the SEAS Research Directory and the UVa President's report.

Entries will be judged on the following general criteria:

• Content: depth, range, completeness, relevance, and accuracy of information;

• Organization: user-friendliness, ease of navigation, and link structure;

• Attractiveness: layout, presentation, color schemes, icons, graphics, readability, uniformity, composition, and overall aesthetic appeal;

• Download Speed (especially at modem speeds);

• Portability: all pages designed must be completely compatible with the latest versions of all the major Web browsers (currently including Netscape 3.0, Microsoft Explorer 3.0, etc.) All HTML should also be compatible with text-only browsers such as Lynx.

  All pages should look reasonable on various different displays and platforms (i.e., PC's, Macs, SUNs, Silicon Graphics, etc.). Note that different displays/screens have different brightness/resolutions/color range, etc., and a page that looks good on one combination of web browser and display type does not necessarily look good on other configurations.

• Maintainability: all pages/sites designed should be well-documented, and easy to maintain and to extend (using CGI/Perl automation where appropriate).

If you have further questions about the rules of the contest or its administration, please contact:

If you are joining the contest, please look at these preliminary instructions.

The newsgroup uva.www.contest will be used to communicate among the contest participants and organizers. It will contain frequently-asked questions (and answers), helpful design tips, and general contest-related information. Please read this newsgroup (and post to it) regularly.

For information on the guidelines and procedures used by the CS department Web Team to build its own WWW pages, please see the Webman Policies and Procedures page for tips. If you have any questions, please contact webteam@cs.virginia.edu.

Please feel free to look at the detailed breakdown of the scores, including judges' comments. In addition to the cash prizes listed above, all eleven teams will also receive free brand-new software from Microsoft Corporation; please contact Rhonda Jones ASAP at 924-1382 or rmb3s@virginia.edu to pick up your software (each member of each team will receive separate copies of the software).

There will be a VEF luncheon where all three winning teams will be honored, on Saturday May 3 beginning at 12:00 noon, at the Farmington Country Club. All members of the winning teams are invited, and the prizes will be awarded during this luncheon. If you plan to attend this lunch, please RSVP with Rhonda Jones ASAP at 924-1382 or rmb3s@virginia.edu and tell her you are coming (all winning team members are encouraged to attend).

All teams: now please work with your faculty mentors to incorporate your contest pages into the respective departments' official home pages.

We would like to emphasize that regardless of which teams won cash prizes, contest participants will enjoy various other opportunities / benefits, including visibility among the faculty, gaining valuable Web experience, and job offers for webmaster positions.

All faculty / departments: if you need good webmasters, please feel free to contact individual Web Contest participants.

If you are planning to participate in the second phase of the contest, you are encouraged to review the judges' comments on the entries of the first phase (this will help teams further improve their future sites, and will afford them a competitive advantage).

The following is the list of active teams in the second phase of the VEF/SEAS WWW Design contest, along with the target departments/organizations for which they are creating a new Web site. It is not too late to join: new teams may join the second phase of the contest at any time before the contest is over.

Please see the detailed breakdown of the scores, including judges' comments.

There will be a VEF luncheon honoring the winning teams, on Friday January 30, 1998, at 12:00, at Zhemer Hall. All members of the Second Phase winning teams are invited, and the prizes will be awarded during this luncheon.

All faculty / departments: if you need good webmasters, please feel free to contact individual Web Contest participants.

We thank all students and faculty who helped make this Web contest a great success!