Frequently Asked Questions

The Website of the Year award is the online people’s choice award for the best and most popular websites. The election is an international award and is organized in 7 different countries: France, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. In 2015, over 3 million votes were casted in these countries. The Website of the Year award is independent and objective and is organized by MetrixLab. Website: websiteoftheyearaward.com.

MetrixLab is a market and consumer research agency and part of the Macromill Group. We turn data from online surveys, social media and enterprise systems into valuable business information and actionable consumer insights. Our 1600 experts help leading companies drive product innovation, brand engagement and customer value.

For this election it has been decided to place the nominated websites in categories in order to cover a broad range of sites. The Website of the Year election has 19 categories. Given below are the definitions of each of the categories defined by the organizers. The organisation can modify the definitions at all times.

Selection of the nominated websites

A maximum of 12 nominations are made for each category. Websites are nominated via the selection procedure set out below

1. The winners of the previous edition (depending on the previous year, this will be 1 or 2 websites) plus the runner up for Best Website in the previous edition.

2. A maximum of 5 websites that subscribed for a wildcard. Websites can register themselves in order to be eligible for a wildcard here

3. A maximum of 5 websites per category from the Top 100 list of Alexa. For each country the website must be available in the country’s language, and the organizers place the websites in the 19 categories.

4. If there is room left, the most frequently named websites are nominated by means of a panel survey among 400 respondents per country from the OpinionBar panel. For each country the website must be available in the country’s language, and the organizers place the websites in the 19 categories. Websites that do not fit within one of the categories are not nominated

Wildcard requirements:

Voting is easy and only takes a few moments:

First, choose a category. Now you will find all the nominees in this category. Choose your favorite website in the category and click ‘Vote’, or if you would like to see the website click ‘View’, which will open the website in a new window.

After having chosen your favorite website, you will be asked to award stars to the following aspects of it: design, navigation and content. Awarding more stars will mean that you appreciate these aspects more. Next you will be asked to rate how likely it is that you would recommend this website to your friends, family or colleagues. After that, you can submit your vote and continue voting in other categories. To validate your vote, you will need to fill in your name and email address, after which you will receive an activation email. As soon as you have activated your vote by clicking the link in the email, you will participate to win one of the great prizes! Unconfirmed votes do not participate in the prize draw. It is only necessary to confirm your vote(s) once.

Providing your email address serves multiple purposes. First of all, we need to check that your vote was actually cast by a person and not a computer (a so-called spambot); by sending you a confirmation email, which contains a link to confirm your vote, we are able to check this. Secondly, in order to prevent people voting multiple times for the same website, we need to check each vote per email address. And finally, when you cast your vote, you automatically qualify for winning one of our prizes; we only allot prizes to the voters who filled out a correct email address.

Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that voters do not receive our confirmation email allowing them to confirm their votes. This could be due to the following:

• You are a Gmail user: the email was sent to your Promotions tab.
• You are a Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail user: the email was sent to your Spam folder or blocked by a filter.
• You are using a company email address: the email was blocked by your system administrator.
• You misspelled or entered "www" before your email address when voting. Please vote again with your correct email address.

No, unfortunately this is not possible. Once you have voted and confirmed your vote, it will remain valid.

Please go to our ‘Enroll’ page. Depending on whether the registration period is open or not, you will either find our registration form or our contact form on this page. When the registration period is open, you can fill out the registration form in order to apply for a wildcard nomination. We will contact you if your website has received a nomination. If the registration period is closed, you will be able to fill out our contact form. That way we can notify you when the registration period opens again for the next awards.

A draw will be made out of all participants who have taken part in the vote and left their full name and email address. Only one prize per winner and per household (persons residing under the same roof) will be allocated. The winners will be identified by the email address they have left at websiteoftheyear.co.uk. The prizes will be made available as soon as possible after the announcement of the result of the draw and after the winners have been determined. Please check article 7 of our Regulations for the remainder of the rules.

We encourage websites to promote their nomination in order to recruit votes. However, it is not allowed to promote your nomination by offering voters individual prizes in exchange for a vote, such as: money, vouchers and discount vouchers of any kind. Websites will first receive a warning and will be disqualified if they do not remove the promotional activity within 3 days. It is allowed to do a prize draw amongst all voters.

The voter’s suggestions are shared with the website after the voting period.