JREF Award
The JREF Award is bestowed upon websites covering Japan or Japan related topics which - in our humble opinion -
merit special attention for
- excellent content,
- outstanding concept and
- appealing web design.
We established a few criteria your website should meet in case you intend to apply for the JREF Award.
Please make sure you have read these criteria prior to submitting your site.
Please allow us two weeks to evaluate and respond to your application. If we do not reply within 14 days, we kindly
ask you to contact us once again. We shall reply to each single submission.
Not being ranked among the winners at a time should not prevent you from re-applying once you may have carefully
scrutinized your website. Winners will be notified by email. If you win the JREF Award your website will be listed among the
previous winners.
The JREF Award database is not related to the database of the Japan Directory. Ganbatte-ne! |
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Award criteria:
Please note that we emphasise content, not flashing designs, state-of-art plug-ins or other special effects. Websites do not need to be "technically impeccable", therefore we shall not analyse your HTML codes line by line. It is your website's overall impression and usefulness that is decisive in the end.
We check your website for the following elements:
- Content: quality (and quantity) of information, usefulness, relevance, originality
- Design: graphics, style, combination of colours, legibility, overall compatibility
- Layout: HTML compliance, originality, browser support
- Speed: at least your site should be worth waiting for
- Navigability: easy and logically structured, no loops or pop-up windows
- Additional features: interactive features such as bulletin boards, chats, rating systems, feedback forms, mailing lists
Once you have submitted your website to be reviewed, we will scrutinise it with different browsers
(currently MS Explorer 5.5, 6.0, Netscape Communicator 4.80 and 7.2, Opera 7.0 and Mozilla 1.6). Websites may be commercial or non-profit, relevancy is the keyword. After careful evaluation your homepage will be rated. According to that rating, you will eventually receive the Gold, Silver or Bronze Award.
There are a few things we do not look very favourably upon, such as background music (in particular if it cannot be
turned off), blinking texts, Flash intros (the most useless feature encountered on the net), animated graphics, excessive use of advertising banners and pop-up
windows, Java-script errors, non-functional perl scripts ("internal server errors") and the like.
We will entirely disregard anonymous submissions, websites not related to Japan, as well as pages with hateful and/or profane content. Please bear in mind that your IP address will be logged, we therefore reserve steps against repeated perpetrators.
Thanks for your patience. We wish you good luck!
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