UWSAG talks to John Foster
of Texas Precancel Club Awards

Owner: Texas Precancel Club Awards rated 3.0+ with UWSAG
Winner: UWSAG Award Seekers Pick! for June, 2003
Winner: UWSAG Top Ten! for November, 2003
Winner: UWSAG Ultimate 25 Gold Award

1. What got you started in website design?
   
   "After being ignored at work after receiving a Computerworld-Smithsonian nomination medal for innovative software design (not a website) in the mail from the Smithsonian, I decided to learn HTML and setup a website at home for my stamp club. I soon figured out that applying for and receiving web awards was FUN! The site has received 1.5 awards/day on the average. It is getting tougher lately, because I need to find time to judge some of my own awards and to add content to the site."
   
   
2. What do you hope to accomplish with your award program?
   
   "I hope to help some webmasters out there with some customized feedback to improve their sites."
   
   
3. What advice would you give other program owners?
   
   "Don’t apply for those Top Rated awards first. You will waste your time and theirs listening to the silence. Work your way up. Also apply for some “non-rated” awards that offer feedback. You may get some surprising and interesting answers. One observation may be ignored. After 3-4 webmasters say the same thing, you may need to THINK about making a change. After 5-10 webmasters reply with identical responses, you should wonder why you have not made the change yet. Some replies may be inconsistent, but many site objectives may be different."
   
   
4. What was the biggest problem you faced with your award program?
   
   "Setting up pages that satisfy EVERYONE ELSE’S criteria for what should be on MY site takes a lot of time – scoring, disqualifying, status, privacy, plans, history, criteria, memberships, child safe, personality, indexes, summaries, etc. Just keep chewing."
   
   
5. If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?
   
   "I would verify that I could save the Word file while still in a webmailer, so I would not lose a whole interview page. Now that I have forwarded the message elsewhere to a native computer with Word, I can start over, since it now works. My home computers are in a MS Office free zone. I would have visited the Goodwill store earlier. My new/old $150 500 Mhz computer has Win98 2nd edition, a very stable OS. Previewing the site offline with NoteTab saves a LOT of time, and I can even follow the links."
   
   
6. What plans do you have for the future?
   
   "I may have to find a second job to pay the spiraling property taxes that the first one does not cover. I could not qualify now to live in my own house if I had to buy it."
   
   
7. What else do you like to do?
   
   "In addition to the website subject, I gather fruit stickers for my wife’s collection and collect vultures on stamps, on hockey pucks, on matchbook covers, on banana stickers, etc. etc."