Inaugural UK.COM Awards: Meet The Winner...
We always knew that selecting one overall UK.COM Awards winner would be no mean feat, so we surrendered the grueling task to our expert judging panel who left no stone unturned in scouring and scoring each and every one of the 24 finalist websites. Rating everything from concept to execution, including functionality, innovation and design, our elite group of technology, media and business specialists slowly narrowed the final lineup of lateral thinkers and creative leapers using UK.COM domains down to just one!
Congratulations MoreThanWords.uk.com for wooing the judges and taking out first honours in the inaugural UK.COM Awards! Double congratulations for becoming the recipient of the £5000 cash prize.
We were fortunate enough to meet with a gushing Lisa Long, aka creative brain behind the bespoke typographic art website that is MoreThanWords.uk.com, for a small chat and a very big cheque presentation at the offices of Webfusion, the domain name registry used by Lisa to register her .UK.COM domain name.
1. Lisa, first of all a big congratulations to you on such an amazing achievement! How does it feel to have eclipsed such household names as Avon, Microsoft, Radiohead, Koko and Sketch, to win first prize in the inaugural .UK.COM Awards?
Thank you very much. I was pretty overwhelmed when I heard the news that I'd won the award. It's a big achievement, even more so as the calibre of entrants was so amazing. I'm thrilled to have been selected, as a small and relatively new business, over big brands such as Microsoft and Avon.
2. The judges praised the uniqueness and simplicity of your business idea together with its ability to successfully capture the zeitgeist. How did you conceive the idea of bespoke word art?
More Than Words was born out of a need for artwork to fill my own home. I was looking for something personal and meaningful and my lifetime love of design typography led me to create a bespoke piece of word art. I had so many requests to create a similar piece for friends and family that I realised there was a gap in the market for high quality personalised artwork, created using people's unique words. I launched More Than Words online in April 2010 and the rest is history. We created a 'one-stop-shop' personalised art website and the business has gone from strength to strength. We now have customers across the globe, have been nominated for multiple awards, featured in international print magazine and on television, and have an exciting list of celebrity and corporate clients.
3. What factors did you consider when selecting the UK.COM domain extension for your business’s web address, and how would you say that your business has evolved as a result of this decision?
I was looking for something unique and I also wanted something affordable. .com and .co.uk names have become quite saturated and I was set on the name 'More Than Words', which captures exactly what we offer, for the business. I could secure this name using a UK.COM web address. Despite now being a global business, it's great that we can use a UK.COM name to keep us grounded in the UK.
I also wanted a domain name that would allow me to build the brand to achieve a page 1 ranking in top search engines such as Google. A year and half later I am proud that we've achieved this tough task, helped by our UK.COM web address.
4. So you’ve just pocketed a sweet £5000 for your efforts. Congratulations! How will you be spending your hard earned cash?
Our success in the first year and a half has been fantastic, so much so that we have had to implement a back-end data reporting system and front-end functionality improvements to make the site even more user-friendly, such as offering our customers standard international delivery charges. The money will be directed at these site improvements and the rest of it will be spent on product development and marketing initiatives, helping us to launch some great new products over the next year.
Meet The Four Catergory Winners
Best business idea: made.uk.com
Best creative idea: morethanwords.uk.com
|
Best design, content, functionality of a creative website: koko.uk.com
Best design, content, functionality of a business website: suck.uk.com
|