Explainer
How it works
Five chapters. No jury, no paid placement.
- 01
Submit
Pay a flat £9.99 (launch offer). Every field, the language, the URL and the domain cooldown are checked before you pay, so your site goes live in minutes. Desktop and mobile screenshots are captured for you automatically (replace them with your own if you like), and any video is optimised to WebM/MP4. Submit a site.
- 02
Checks
We run Google Safe Browsing and a PageSpeed Insights test on mobile and desktop. Speed is shown on the site page and powers the Developer Award (mobile Lighthouse 90+ in all four categories, desktop Performance 95+, Core Web Vitals not failed, and the Honourable Mention bar; plus a monthly Developer Award for the fastest qualifier), but never changes your score. At the same time we run one Mozilla HTTP Observatory scan of your security headers and show its grade (A+ to F) and score here on the site page. That grade is for information only and never counts towards any award. We also run one automated accessibility check with axe-core against WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 rules (levels A, AA and AAA) and show the result as, for example, "WCAG AA · no automated issues" or "WCAG A · 3 issues". Automated checks catch only part of WCAG, so this is never a claim of compliance, and it never counts towards scores or awards.
- 03
Vote
Your 72-hour voting window opens the moment you're published (straight after payment and checks); there's no daily cap and no waiting for a slot. For 72 hours anyone with a verified account can score Design, Usability, Creativity and Content from 1 to 10 in half points. Votes lock after 72 hours.
- 04
Score maths
Your score is a weighted mean of category averages. With 20+ effective votes we trim the top and bottom 10%, then apply Bayesian smoothing toward the global mean (m = 15), so a few early votes can't decide a result.
- 05
Awards and integrity
The top site scoring 7.00+ with 25+ effective votes becomes Site of the Day at 08:00 UK time. 6.50+ with 15+ earns an Honourable Mention. Every Monday at 08:00 UK time the best site of the previous week becomes Site of the Week. Later public votes keep counting towards the weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly awards (a 50/50 blend with the 72-hour score). On the 1st of each month the fastest qualifying site of the previous month wins the Developer Award of the Month, and on 1 January the people and studios with the most public award points become Designer of the Year and Studio of the Year (Studio: 2–10 people, Agency: 11+). All of these are picked automatically from public votes, with no jury and no admin approval. Owners and credited people can't vote on their own work, and votes our systems flag as suspicious are automatically excluded from every score, live and period. Awards are always picked from clean votes and publish automatically; nobody holds or approves them. Voting rules.
40%
Design
Visual quality: layout, typography, colour, imagery and polish.
30%
Usability
How easy, fast and accessible it is to use on every device.
20%
Creativity
Originality of the idea, interactions and art direction.
10%
Content
The quality and clarity of the writing, media and story.