All reach and serve their target audiences and overall look good and work well. All appear to yield some kind of return, although when it comes to measuring value, the bottom line isn't always the bottom line. Amnesty International , for example, says its Web site trims costs for printing and mailing materials supporting its efforts to protect human rights. Returning champions all demonstrated they'd significantly improved their sites' scope or service in the past year. Trade Compass, a resource for global trade data, created a network of integrated business applications for the cargo-transport industry.
Nobody understands crowd-pleasing better than sites developed to serve a narrow market slice.
But the site also fulfills a membership-building strategy, cleverly offering nonmembers just enough information to entice them into paying dues for full access. The site for customers of bovine-genetics company ABS Global Inc. will puzzle, maybe even amuse, visitors who don't know a Holstein from a hole in the ground. But it's packed with breeding data, sales and employment information, scientific news and other links for the cattle-breeding community it serves. As in last year's awards, quite a few winners were honored for elegantly simple concepts ideally tailored to the Web. Among them, several created new intermediaries, driving yet another stake through the heart of the idea that there's no room for middlemen on the Internet.