Beating the competition

Pardon the nepotism, but here's a link to an article at Clare's new weblog: How to run a writing competition and keep the competitors happy, which is a guide on how not to present competitions.

As our household computer consultant, I can assure you it's all true, particularly the bit about design of competition entry forms.  Over the years I've had to photoshop or otherwise correct a long stream of supposedly printable entry forms that were not fit for purpose:

• insufficient room to complete your details;
• bad formatting so that the form wouldn't print to fit on an A4 page;
• forms where the page designer had somehow managed to break both the File/Print option and the ability to save the text for offline printing;
• downloaded forms that had to be hacked out of obscure file formats (e.g. the notoriously unreadable Microsoft Publisher .PUB files);
• forms inextricably embedded in graphics-heavy pages that waste gallons of printer ink;
• and so on.

If we found them heavy weather, I'm absolutely sure others did.

- Ray