In preparation for the 2014 season, we’ve been working hard this summer to set up a shiny new website for the Cybils Awards. The old website has served us well, but after eight years of continually adding to it, it was getting cluttered and difficult to find what you’re looking for. So, we decided to make a fresh start.
Our goal with the new website was to make sure the information you need is at your fingertips. There is a section specifically for bloggers and judges, and another section for authors and publishers. We have in many cases tried to provide multiple routes to the same information, so that no matter where you are you can find what you need.
We especially wanted to bring the books front and center, because after all, that’s why we’re doing this. Eight years of Cybils Awards have provided a wealth of excellent books for children and teens, but on the old website it wasn’t always easy to sift through our picks. We wanted to make it easy for anyone to find the right books for each child. The Books Page provides links to finalist and winner posts from the most recent year, as well as previous years, and links to all the printable finalist lists.
The Featured Book on both the books page and the home page rotates through the 2013 finalists and winners; if you refresh the page you’ll see a different featured book each time. Eventually the plan is for it to include finalists and winners from all years, but some data cleanup is required before we can expand it. We also plan to provide a way for publishers and authors to sponsor that space for increased exposure, but only winners and finalists, or sequels to winners and finalists, will be eligible to be a sponsored featured book.
View Cybils Finalists
In the right sidebar on the pages, you’ll see links to view the finalists for each year from 2009 to the present. Clicking on any year will bring up an interactive dialog that will let you browse finalists by year and category. We will also expand this feature to include all years back to our inaugural year in 2006, but again, data cleanup is required on the older years before we can include them. We’re also planning a fuller interactive bookfinder that will let you search and filter all Cybils nominees, not just finalists and winners.
With the new website, we also want to do more to celebrate and include the wider Kidlit blogging community. One thing that we are implementing is a featured blogger. Each week, we hope to highlight a different blogger who is active in the Cybils community. It doesn’t have to be someone who has served as a judge; anyone who participates in the Cybils by blogging, tweeting, nominating, sharing suggested booklists, or in any other way is eligible. If you would like to nominate someone for Featured Blogger, please send a paragraph about them and why you’re nominating them to Blog Editor Melissa Fox at blogeditor (at) cybils (dot) com.
This website has been a team effort created by Sarah Stevenson, Sheila Ruth, Jen Robinson, and Anne Boles Levy. We hope that you enjoy it! Please feel free to send us feedback or suggestions to info (at) cybils (dot) com.
Please update your feed reader with the new RSS feed to make sure you don’t miss any posts.
Happy Cybils 2014!