Best International Support Sites: FAQ

The Big Picture

Who can enter?

The Year’s Ten Best International Web Support Sites is open to any company or organization that provides support in three or more languages (including the language of their home market). If you provide support in more than three languages, you may choose which languages will be considered in your evaluation.

We only support two languages, our source language and one other. Can we still enter?

No. The awards recognize those support sites with a significant international local-language reach, something that requires more than two languages for our purposes.

Do we have to be LISA or ASP members to participate?

No, the awards program is open to any organization that provides support in at least three languages (a source language and two or more additional languages).

How do we enter The Year’s Ten Best International Web Support Sites?

The entry process is entirely on-line. To begin your entry, visit the on-line entry form, and register. After your payment is processed, you will receive instructions on how to log on to a secure site and provide your entry materials. All materials must be provided on-line.

Our source language is German, and English is one of our target languages. Can we still enter?

Absolutely. LISA will have judges to evaluate English localizations as well as ones in other languages.

We localize a site for a client rather than our own. Can we enter?

You may enter a client’s site on their behalf, but please describe the relationship clearly in the entry materials so our judges understand what’s happening. And if you focus just on the localization services you provide, your scores will likely suffer.

How does the judging process work?

Based on the proven methodology of the ASP Ten Best Web Support Sites program, each entry is reviewed by a panel of six judges (three per each of two localized languages), using a scoring system that measures 25 different performance criteria. The sites with the highest scores will be recognized as the “Year’s Best International Web Support Sites.”

How many winners will there be?

The number of award winners will depend on the number of entries we receive, but will be no more than ten

What languages can we use?

We will have judges for English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Chinese. For other language, please contact us as soon as possible so that we can arrange judges for your site.

Entry Process

When are entries accepted and what is the deadline?

We begin accepting entries in March 2008, and the new, extended entry deadline will be September 18, 2008.

In what languages can I submit my entry materials?

While we would like to accept entries in Japanese, German or other languages, English is the only language we can reasonably expect all of our judges to understand. And if you win, your essays will be published in a book with world-wide distribution. Therefore all entries must be in English (although the sites judged will obviously include other languages).

What is the purpose of the essay section?

Part of the goal of the awards is to reward companies that have integrated localization into their business processes. In the essay section you can highlight the strengths of your site you want the judges to focus on and those aspects of your business process that the judges will not be able to directly observe in your site. It is in your best interest to be frank about the strengths and weaknesses in your efforts rather than submitting essays that hype a solution or overstate success: essays that identify real issues in integrating international support solutions into overall business strategies will be the most useful.

How long should the essays be?

We recommend that the essays not exceed ten pages each. Keeping answers brief and to the point will help judges appreciate what you have done with your site.

May we embed the screen shots in the essays?

Yes. However, since you don’t know what sort of monitor judges will view your entry on or what it will look like when they print it out, you may want to put screen shots on the web and provide a link to the screen shots. Also, don’t save your screen shots in JPEG format: the compression used in JPEGs can make screen shots illegible; use GIF, BMP or another non-lossy format.

Our site is password-protected. What do we do?

We’ll ask you to provide a generic password that we can pass on to the judges for the duration of the competition. (A generic password is easiest for us to administer, because judges are assigned randomly.) We also strongly encourage you to TEST the password you submit with your entry: in the past our judges have been provided passwords that do not work or were not provided needed passwords, and this creates delays and hassles for our judges that don’t encourage them to look too kindly on your site.

How can we pay the entry fee?

LISA will accept credit cards and bank transfers. We will provide a paid invoice upon receipt of payment.

Judging and Scoring

How do we find out about the scoring system?

Just download a copy of the Scoring Criteria document we give all of our judges. Our scoring system is completely open and transparent—you can see exactly what we look at and how many possible points we assign. This openness is what has made the ASP awards so useful to companies, and we are extending this same method to international support sites.

Many of the scoring criteria, don’t apply to our site. Will we be at a disadvantage?

No. We don’t expect every site to excel in all 25 metrics. In the ASP awards, no site has excelled in all the metrics, and we don’t expect your localized site to either. Sites can receive awards in one of two ways: (1) they can have a few very well developed features, or (2) they can have many feature that aren’t as well developed. Companies have received awards both ways in the ASP program, and our awards use the same scoring systems.

Who are the judges?

Most of our judges are recruited from LISA members. We try to find a broad mix of talents and expertise so that our evaluations will reflect many points of view. Most of our judges will be involved in localization and they will understand the challenges of international support.

Can someone be a judge if their company also enters the competition?

Yes, although we obviously won’t assign anyone to judge their own site, nor will we assign judges to evaluate sites developed by direct competitors, clients or former employers.

Will your judges sign non-disclosure agreements?

If that’s a concern, let us know in advance and we’ll select judges for your entry who will agree to swallow a cyanide capsule rather than disclose your secrets. Please note, however, that the entry materials you provide should not include confidential material, since we publish selections from the winning submissions after the awards are presented.

How long does the judging take?

We plan on announcing winners by June, 2008. The individual site evaluations will take two or three weeks to produce, and the Year’s Best International Support Sites book should be ready soon thereafter. We are planning on an awards ceremony in November in Dublin to honor the winners.

Winning

How much visibility will the winners get?

For most winners, the most valuable publicity will come from posting our “award winner” logo on their support site, where it will be seen by customers and partners who visit the site. In the case of the ASP Best Support Sites awards program, at least one large PC manufacturer in Austin, Texas, now brags about “award-winning support” in their TV commercials, which suggests that winning awards like this can have serious marketing value.

How long can I display the awards logo?

There’s no limit (and no licensing fee, incidentally), although the awards logo identifies the year in which it was awarded.

If we don’t win, what will we get?

A lot. First, we’ll show you how the judges scored your site in each of our 25 performance areas, and then compare these scores against category benchmarks to show your relative strengths and weaknesses. We’ll also provide you with the text comments that the judges made about your site. You’ll also get a complimentary electronic copy of The Year’s Ten Best International Web Support Sites, a book-length review of the year’s winners.