VOTING for the People's Choice Awards for the 1999 Philippine Web Awards is now officially open.

The web award giving body launched this special award last year to allow the Internet community to pick its own favorites from the official list of nominated websites.

Last year's People's Choice Awards was as highly anticipated as the main awards. The competition was keen as not only the finalists qualify, but all nominated websites as well. This gave those that did not make it to the finals the chance to bring home an award. Just as important, it gave Internet users the chance to choose their own favorite websites.

This year, instead of having an awardee for each category, there will be just five top winners for the People's Choice Awards. This makes the competition a lot more intense as hundreds of websites vie for the Top Five.

In order to vote, one has to visit the official website of the Philippine Web Awards at www.webbyawards.com.ph and register. A password will be sent to the voter's e-mail address. The voter can then sign in and start voting.

The online voting has several user-friendly features to make it easier for users to cast their votes. There is a link to each category that leads to the official list of nominees. One doesn't have to complete the voting in one sitting. In fact, a voter can go back anytime to change his or her votes before the deadline. There's also an update on how many votes are left for the voter, and a listing of the number of votes one has made on each category.

Voting will run for two months, ending on Nov. 15. The winners will be announced during the awards night.

As the online voting for the People's Choice Awards is proceeding, the editorial team of The Web magazine is busy going through each nominated site to whittle down the list to 90 finalists for the 18 categories.

With a team consisting of writers, website reviewers, graphic designers and programmers, only the best websites will come out as finalists. Strict criteria and guidelines as well as high standards have been set in scoring the nominees.

The criteria are content, design, links and overall impression. Content includes the appropriateness of the site to the category, the quality of writing and editing, the regularity of content updates and the depth of information. Design covers outstanding layout, appealing graphics, consistency in the look, appropriateness to the site's purpose and quality of images. Links include not just external links to related websites but ease and intuitiveness of internal navigation as well as the logical structure of the entire website. Overall impression is the X-factor, the quality that makes the visitor bookmark the site and spread the word about it.