HI!!! I'm Ashley. I'm 13 and in 8th grade, and I have a page all about my two guinea pigs, Clover (she's an Abyssinian, tan and white, her fur sticks up in swirls like she just woke up) and Mocha (she's smooth and brown and she is the boss even though she's smaller).

Back in March I found out there are AWARDS for web pages. Like, people look at your page and if it's good they give you a little picture that says so and you get to put it on your page!!! I wanted one SO bad. So I applied for one. And then another one. And then I started keeping a notebook. By September I had applied for FORTY. I wrote down every single one, when I applied and what happened, and now I'm putting it all here so you can learn from my mistakes. (There were a lot of mistakes.) ~*~

The whole list of all 40, with the dates, is here: ~*~ My Award List ~*~

The real award pictures are on my piggy page. I didn't put all 11 here because 11 big award pictures take FOREVER to load, which is another thing I learned. So you get trophies. ~*~

In June I applied for Christopher's Cool Kid Site Award. It's an award for pages made by kids (you have to be 15 or younger) and it's run by a kid named Christopher, and his mom checks every page too.

He wrote back and said he couldn't give it to me because I had yellow words on white. Which is his rule #3. IT IS RIGHT THERE IN HIS RULES. "No yellow words on white!!" With two exclamation points. I had not read the rules. I just sent it. I was SO embarrassed. But he was really nice about it, nicer than he had to be, and he was RIGHT. I made my mom read my page from across the room and she couldn't read the yellow parts either.

So I changed every yellow word on my whole page to purple (obviously) and I applied again on September 18. His page says he writes back in about a week, longer if he has a lot of homework, which, same. So I'm waiting!!! Fingers crossed!!! ~*~

Christopher, if you are reading this: hi! The words are purple now.

1. READ THE RULES. Every award has rules. Some are about how old you have to be, some are about what your page is about, some are about colors (!!!). Read every single one before you apply. It takes like two minutes. I learned this one the hard way, see above.

2. Fix your page BEFORE you apply. In March my page had three broken pictures and I didn't even know, because they showed up fine on MY computer. That's because they were ON my computer, not on GeoCities. Oops. The judges see the page the way everybody else does, not the way you do. So check your spelling, check your pictures from a different computer (I use the one at the school library), and check your colors.

3. Don't trust an award you can get by putting up a link. If they want their banner on your front page before they will even look at you, it's not an award, it's an ad. And if they give it to everybody who asks, the same day, it's not an award, it's a sticker. A real award means somebody actually looked at your page. I don't count those three in my 11. Casey can count hers if she wants.

4. Write a thank-you note. When you win, write back and say thank you. It's polite, my grandma says so, and also people remember you. Two of the people who gave me awards wrote back to my thank-you note, and one of them told me about the Little Squeakers Award, which I then WON. So.

5. (bonus) Don't apply for 40. Seriously, just pick a few good ones that fit your page. Some of these I applied to just because the award picture was pretty. That is not a good reason. (The Crystal Unicorn one IS really pretty though.)

Want to visit Clover and Mocha? E-mail me and I'll send you the address of my piggy page! My mom has a rule that I don't put both of my pages' addresses everywhere all over the Internet, it's a whole thing, don't ask. ~*~