So, the Webby Awards 2005 winners have been announced, and I can’t help feeling that they’ve missed an opportunity somewhat to showcase some of the exciting new work that’s going on in the industry at the minute.

There’s some brilliant looking sites in there for sure. And informative ones at that, but very little credit given to the people pushing things forward in terms of best practice for coding, web standards or accessibility.

You could argue that nobody really bothers about these things, apart from a handful of geek developers, who would otherwise spend the day debating the latest Firefox extension.

True perhaps, but the sooner we recognise the changing attitudes to design AND functionality, the sooner the web will be a better place for everybody.

I’m certainly not going to begrudge any of the winners of the 2005 Webby Awards. There are stacks of beautiful, informative and just plain cool sites to check out, but I’d like to the see the addition of new categories to recognise the achievements of developers improving the way sites are made, or finding new ways for people to communicate across the web.

Next year hopefully.