ABANow.org nominated for Webby Award. Vote Now!

Time to break out the champagne and noise makers – we just got nominated for a Webby! We’re one of five finalists for best website in the Law category for creating the ABANow.org website.

There are two opportunities for us to win. First, a panel of judges will select a category winner. Second, the public can vote as part of the People’s Voice Awards. So here’s how you can help. Go to The People’s Voice and vote for ABANow.org under the law category. Voting for the People’s Voice Awards is already under way and continues on until April 29th. Every vote counts, so in the great Chicago tradition, vote early (and often?)!

So what is a Webby exactly? Take the Emmys, the Oscars and the Grammys, roll them into one, sprinkle with Internety-awesome dust and BAM – you have the Webbys. More seriously, the Webbys are the award for Internet excellence. Just being nominated is a big deal, since this year they had over 10,000 entries from all 50 states as well as 60+ countries from all over the world and past winners include sites like BBC News, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, NPR, and PBS.

For ABANow, our challenge was to provide increased accessibility to the American Bar Association’s vast collection of articles, resources and multimedia and improve the site’s overall flexibility, allowing users to interact with these assets in a personal meaningful way.

To accomplish this, we paired a slick new user-centric front end with an aggressive content aggregator to return results that instantly provide visitors with an overview of key issues and promote further browsing by offering up related content on a silver platter. We also increased overall user engagement by implementing commenting, sharing, and tie-ins with dozens of popular social networks.

We also custom built a cutting-edge multimedia player from scratch that rivals the big boys in the multimedia industry like YouTube and Vimeo. Like these multimedia providers, our ABANow player is branded, provides embed and full screen options, HD quality video and synced it to an iTunes library so users can view this content both at a computer and on the go.

With this nod from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, we’d say ABANow accomplished its goals and then some.