Craft Brewing Business wins award: Named one of the top 10 business websites in America (fist pump)

We were in Washington, D.C., last week, yuking it up at the National Press Club. We were attending the American Society of Business Publication Editors’ 2018 National Conference and Azbee Awards Banquet. Craft Brewing Business was a finalist for the most coveted web award in the business publication world — Website of the Year, 2018 Azbee Awards of Excellence. We did not win (cue sad trombone), but we were awarded the designation as one of the top 10 business websites in America, which ain’t half bad.

In the Website of the Year competition, StateScoop.com earned the top honor, and TechRepublic’s website (a CBS title) and Engineering News-Record’s ENR.com won honorable mentions. Filling out the rest of the top 10 were Big Law Business (owned by Bloomberg), CIO, Craft Brewing Business, Financial-Planning.com, Insurance Business America, Law360 and tedmag.com. Website of the year is one of only a few categories of overall excellence (like Magazine of the Year) that is only judged on a national scale. Also, most of the websites we were competing against are owned by giant publishing houses or media groups, while we’re four guys using a chatbox as an office.

So in summary: Out of all the business websites in America (not just beverage or beer, but all of’em!) Craft Brewing Business is one of the best. Wow. What an honor. Look how happy this made us.

As you can tell, just making the top 10 isn’t exactly what we’re aiming for. We want to be the best business website in America, so we’ll continue perfecting our style of hard-hitting beer journalism, which we’ll continue to post four times a day on this very site. We thank you, the reader, for sticking with us. Just to give you an idea of how the Website of the Year category is judged, here’s the criteria:

• The quality of writing, reporting, and editing
• Value and usefulness to readers,
• Design,
• Effectiveness in quick communication of information,
• Navigation ease,
• Interactivity and community,
• Use of Web technologies and graphic design to support and add usefulness to editorial,
• Legibility and readability,
• Clear distinctions between editorial and advertising,
• Depth of information,
• Information architecture/editorial organization, and
• Just being awesome in general.