An Empire of Strawmen takes the crown as West Kootenay’s top web-designers
By Nelson Daily Staff
They came, they saw, they ingested excess amounts of caffeine and ultimately (despite a few baggy red eyes) they conquered.
While others may have been enjoying the new snow in the mountains, hanging out with family or simply relaxing over the weekend, three local web-development teams spent all night Friday and most of Saturday, designing, coding and building new websites for deserving non-profits and emerging small businesses.
The result? Ecstatic recipients of fresh, beautifully designed, functional new websites, new connections made between friends and colleagues in the local new media sector and, of course, cold hard cash handed out to the top three web-design collectives in the region.
And the winner was …
Taking home top prize was David Livingstone of Rossland-based Empire New Media in cooperation with Shane Hainsworth of Strawman Design from Nelson.
They received a $1,000 prize and glory as champions of the first 24-hour WebDev Showdown.
The Strawman-Empire New Media team put together a content management system (CMS)-based site for local business Winterbees; an innovative new West Kootenay-based company that has developed Goretex-like jackets for beehives to help them survive the winter.
“Shane and I very much wanted to participate in this Web Dev Showdown, for the sheer pleasure of developing, but also with the added fun of the challenge of doing so within 24 hours,” said Livingstone.
“It was also a rare opportunity to get in touch with other local designers to network and learn from one another.”
Coming in a close second …
A collection of self-titled hackers, The Nelson Tech Club collected the $500 second prize for their work developing a new site for Gaia Janitorial Services — a new company dedicated to LEED certified cleaning practices.
“We didn’t use any existing templates or CMS systems to get started,” said team Leader Brad Pommen “In the spirit of the competition we literally built the site from the ground up and coded it all by hand.”
Sean Melvin, owner of Gaia Janitorial Services was so please with the site he received from the competition that he doubled the second place team’s winnings out of his own pocket.
Rounding out the field the I9 Design team was awarded $250 for their work creating an online gallery for artist Anju Virginie Baysse’s company Terraconta.
The results speak for themselves
The teams at KAST and Tech Village were pleased with the turnout, competition and results of the first 24-hour WebDev Showdown and are already working on tweaks and improvements to bring the event back bigger and better for next year.
With the aim of bringing together businesses and organizations in the digital new-media sector to promote, learn, collaborate and celebrate, the event hit a high note as the networking session went late into Saturday evening.
“Tech Village is all about collaboration and bringing together the people in the new media world we’ve got residing right here in the West Kootenay,” said Andrew Zwicker, Tech Village board member and emcee for the night.
Resources
• For more information on Tech Village visit www.techvillage.com- featuring the new Tech Village Tech Directory.
• Sponsored by: the Kootenay Association for Science and Technology, Invest Kootenay and Tech Village, Columbia Basin Trust.
About 24-hour WebDev Showdown
The 24-hour WebDev Showdown was an online design duel between teams of two to five of the most talented web designers in the region.
Teams competed for $1,750 in cash prizes as they developed a website in 24 hours or less for a deserving local emerging company or non-profit organization. More info at www.kast.com/showdown.
About Tech Village
Tech Village shares the core values of collaboration, integrity and transparency, long term community building, commitment to quality, frugality and simplicity, an entrepreneurial attitude, sharing recognition, opportunities, and knowledge, and maintaining balanced lifestyle.
Their mission is to flourish as an enterprising non-profit that strives to be nimble and responsive to the needs of digital media, software and IT members in the West Kootenay region.
