Focus Multimedia Wins WebAward For World Cup Soccer Web Site.

Citing “outstanding achievement in website development” the Web Marketing Association announced that Focus Multimedia is the recipient of its 2002 “Standard for Excellence” WebAward. The interactive solutions firm was selected from among 1300 entries for its design of the “La Opinión 2002 World Cup” Web site, a Spanish language interactive portal devoted to the recent soccer world championship. Focus Multimedia designed the site for La Opinión, the leading daily Spanish language newspaper in the U.S.

The winning site (www.laopinion.com/mundial2002), known in Spanish as “Mundial 2002,” was created to offer extensive coverage of the 2002 World Cup Korea/Japan for an audience that passionately follows soccer. Mundial 2002 brought avid fans up-to-the-minute World Cup scores, statistics, and rosters.

It presented ticker-tape headlines, in-depth articles, image galleries, schedules, game locations, team profiles, and tournament standings. The site was unrivaled by Spanish language sites in the U.S., and represented the paper’s most robust effort to date to deliver interactive World Cup content to a soccer-hungry U.S. Hispanic audience.

“Great site. The content is fantastic,” said one of the contest judges in a posting on the WebAward Web site (www.webaward.org). The Web Marketing Association’s sixth annual competition is the premier event where Web sites compete head-to-head with competitors within their industry and against an overall standard of excellence. Entries were judged on design, innovation, content, interactivity, navigation, ease of use and use of technology. The competition was judged by a team of independent Internet professionals representing a variety of relevant disciplines of Web site development. Judges included members of the media, advertising executives, site designers, corporate marketing executives, content providers and webmasters.

“Winners of the 2002 WebAward Competition represent some of the best Web sites on the Internet today,” said William Rice, President of the Web Marketing Association, an independent organization founded with the purpose of evaluating and recognizing the standard of excellence on the World Wide Web.

“We’re very pleased to win this award, and we plan to share this honor with La Opinión, whose excellent team made this possible,” said Luis Jimenez, vice president of Focus Multimedia, which won in the Sports category. “This is just one example of how our company integrates cutting-edge design, powerful databases, and customer relationship management tools to achieve results for our clients.”