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Having been shortlisted for the 2007 McFarlane Prize, Propeller packed up their mice and shut down their displays for the day and headed to Sydney for Web Directions South 2007.

Over 600 delegates attended WDS07 along with a raft of exhibitors and international speakers from all disciplines and areas of web design; Andy Clarke, Aaron Gustafson, and Chris Wilson to name but a few. The premier web conference in the Southern hemisphere, WDS07 is sponsored by Microsoft, Adobe, the W3C, Glass Onion and Wired Sky.

The days’ activities culminated in a keynote speech from Chris Wilson, Internet Explorer Platform Architect at Microsoft. Chris has worked on web browsers since 1993, when he co-authored the first version of NCSA Mosaic for Windows. Chris’ presentation on Moving the Web Forward offered a huge insight into the browser development process and was a real eye opener on the problems of backwards compatibility and compatibility balanced against those of meeting and working with web standards – a subject close to our hearts.

Following Chris’ keynote, John Allsopp presented this years’ McFarlane Prize (top) with ‘Finalist’ awards going to Propeller for the Solution Central site, along with Perth-based Spoon Media, Melbourne-based August and Sitepoint.
We congratulate Michael Koukoullis on his win for the Andrews must Resign site.

Reaching the finals of the McFarlane Prize (below right – click for larger view) is a major and unexpected honour for Propeller. Much of the work we do is unseen, as the details are ‘under the hood’, hidden in the code. So, to be recognised by our peers and a panel of international experts in these fields, in a competition of this stature came as a great surprise and is a great reward for the hard work we’ve put in over the past couple of years, working to absolute best practices to produce the best websites currently possible.

You can rest assured that Propeller will be keeping up the good work and we have some fabulous projects in the pipeline to share with you soon, in addition to the two great sites we’ve just launched.

We’d like to point out that the great design, strict web standards coding, accessibility and usability that contributed to Propeller reaching the finals for this award are built into every site we produce. If we’ve already built a site for you, are in the process of building one or you are considering enquiring with us about commissioning a new site, you can be confident that working with one of Australia’s leading web standards based developers; your site will be built to the latest standards ensuring great search engine visibility, user experience, access to persons with disabilities and future proofed!
And you never know, your site could be next years’ McFarlane Prize winner.

WDS07 also gave us the chance to catch up with developers and friends Dave, Matt and Ben from Sydney-based Freshview (pictured right with Damien & Renee) and discuss some great new features we’ll shortly be feeding through our PropellerMail email marketing software. Propeller have been working with Freshview on various projects for over two years now and it was great to finally put faces to the names.

Before we close we’d like to thank all of our friends, colleagues and clients for all their enthusiastic support and kind comments left on the previous article (the cheques are in the mail!)

Also, a big thankyou to Jean-Jacques Halans for the use of a couple of his great photos.