HarvardScience website wins top awards in two categories

The Interactive Media Council has named the HarvardScience website “Best in Class” in both the medicine and science categories of its annual Interactive Media Awards competition.

In notifying HarvardScience of the award, the Council wrote that “the Best in Class award is the highest honor bestowed by the Interactive
Media Awards. It represents the very best in planning, execution and
overall professionalism. In order to win this award level, your site had
to successfully pass through our comprehensive judging process,
achieving very high marks in each of our judging criteria – an
achievement only a fraction of sites in the IMA competition earn each
year.”

The site scored 483 points out of a possible maximum of 500: 98 for design; 99 for content; 95 for feature functionality; 94 for usability; and 97 for compliance and cross-browser compatibility.

The HarvardScience website, which launched only four months ago, was planned and designed to showcase science and engineering research and practice in all of Harvard’s schools and its affiliated hospitals.

The site was designed by Claudio Vera, principal of the firm Studio Module, in collaboration with Harvard’s Office of News and Public Affairs. The site was constructed in Drupal, an extremely flexible, open-source, content management system, which makes constantly updating the material on the site far simpler than it would otherwise be. The Drupal work was done by Maureen Lyons, of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Other Best in Class winners include the History Channel’s American Presidents website, the website of the Arnold and Porter law firm, and websites of Cisco Systems, Inc., and Facebook.