Mr. Knowles recently received another honour for excellence in Bahamian Web design and development, the 2005 Webmaster of The Year Award from the Bahamas Web Awards organizers.
His Queen's College website was already awarded the prestigious Best of the Bahamas Award, the top honour at the Third Annual Bahamas Web Awards ceremony, at the Hilton hotel last December. The prize, a statuesque sculpture, created exclusively for the Bahamas Web Awards by renowned artist Antonius Roberts, represents the top honour for Bahamas related websites. But few people at that time knew the dramatic story behind the spectacular win.
Mr. Knowles persistence and dedication was challenged last year after his server crashed and the entire Queen's College website was lost. The site had already, months earlier, been entered into the Bahamas Web Awards annual competition. Voting was supposed to be underway. Henry sent a regretful email to the BWA administration explaining that the site no longer existed and although he was working frantically to restore it, he felt he could not do it in time to for the judges to vote on it.
Meanwhile behind the scenes at the Bahamas Web Awards, the panel of judges had been delayed in their voting process due to complications in the preparation of the voting interface. Henry Knowles worked so quickly, and so diligently, to restore the Queen's College website that the site was not only back up and running in time for the voting process, but it was as good, or better, than the site that had been lost. The Queen's College web site went on to win a unanimous top vote from all of the judges on the panel (who were completely unaware of any complications or hardship at the time).
Because of his persistance and dedication to excellence, Mr. Knowles was awarded the newly created Webmaster Award.
The Bahamas Web Awards, now entering its fourth year, is the leading national honour for the best among Bahamian websites. The Call for Entries for this year's (2006) contest is set to begin next month.
View the winners of the 2005 Bahamas Web Awards.
The Queen's College site had been the personal project of Mr. Knowles until recently, when the school beefed up their IT team with additional staff.
Now, instead of being a one-man show, as he has been since the inception of the site, Mr. Knowles will have more time to think of the future direction of the Queen's College website and tend to his duties as Deputy Head of the High School.
"We want to include logs for students, giving students and parents more access to information through the web site," Henry said about his plans to expand the web site. "We want to move toward a greater integration between parents and the education of their children."
Mr. knowles has gained all of his web site building knowledge through trial and error and most of all just plain stubborn persistence. He has been dedicated to giving Queen's College a prominent, respectable and highly useful web presence. And his dedication paid off.
On hand to receive the esteemed Webmaster's with Henry were, from left to right, Yvonne Foulkes, Vice Principal; Shawn Turnquest, Vice Principal; (Mr. Henry Knowles, Deputy Head, High School;) and Andrea Gibson, Principal.
The entire Bahamas Web community congratulates Henry Knowles for his perserverence and dedication in building (and rebuilding) the Best Website in the Bahamas.
For more information on this year's Bahamas Web Awards, and the 2006 Call for Entries, visit the Bahamas Web Awards site.
