Slightly inspired by Jane at Competition Grape Vine’s trip down memory lane, plus having a fully functional scanner/printer (goodbye Kodak eco-printer, you were useless) and still unloading a few boxes after moving house – we thought we’d take the opportunity to share with you some of Loquax’s past. We often forget and we think some comper’s probably don’t even know, especially in this fast moving social media world, that we’ve been doing this competition stuff for over 13 years now (crikey). So we’re going to rummage around our magazine and newspaper clippings and bore you share with you some of our old duck related articles.
Back In The Year 2000
Back in 2000, once everyone had realised that computers still work and aeroplanes don’t drop out the sky, there were a number of internet magazines. One was called The Net and they set up their awards called “The Very Best of The World Wide Web” for the year 2000. Amongst the winners were Google, Amazon, lastminute.com, Yahoo, Internet Movie Database, The BBC and Motley Fool. Anyone know what happened to those guys? Anyway, amongst all those big name winners was Loquax. An unexpected second birthday present saw us named as the Readers’ Choice award winner! According to The Net, we “squeezed out the imdb and bbc.co.uk for the prestigious award”. We were described as “a no frills site” with “a wealth of goodies for Web compers”. We were also “attracting a third of million page views”.
How Did We Win?
Most of that is still the same (we now do 6 or 7 million pages), but as you can see from the images, the look of the site was a lot different! Thankfully we’ve got a little better at web design. In truth, the current Loquax set up could do with a bit of more modern look, but we’re holding out until the “retro look” comes back into fashion. So just how did we win the Readers’ Choice?We’d like to think it was because we were simply brilliant! However, we can tell you that The Net ran a competition to encourage people to nominate sites for the awards. The prize was an MP3 Player, which at the time was pretty good. So we sent The Net lots of traffic, those people nominated Loquax as part of their competition entry and lo and behold we won. For Loquax it was a fantastic achievement, albeit the circumstances were slightly in our favour! Sadly, The Net magazine didn’t last and we weren’t able to influence the outcome of win any internet magazine awards again.