The story goes back to December 12th, 1998, the day we launched our first awards program "The PC Music Awards of Excellence". Triggered by the possibility to actually "win" an award for my design attempts,  being honored and recognized by fellow web designers, share and gaining tips to improve on current issues, and of course, the huge potential awards seemed to have eventually led to the creation of our own awards program.

Of course, becoming recognized as an award giving site was not easy at all. Back then we did not know about the existence of award indices such as Award Sites! or Website Awards as we know it today. Instead, we discovered Juno Award Project, who submitted awards program to potential award winners. Back then, we received about 5 entries for evaluation, and the idea was to contact the webmaster to apply for your award.

Introduction of Maestro's

Since the closure of the Juno web site, our awards program almost came to a stand still. I've met Maggi Norris early February 1999 when she applied for the PC Music Award. Ever since, we have kept contact, and eventually we became best friends in July 1999, which also saw my enrollment in the Nem5 Awards program. We jointly introduced the first evaluators panel, back then the only one besides World's Best Website's. Since then we became partners.

While evaluating websites for Nem5 and Steliart, Maestro Awards was completely redesigned. A lot of structural and content changes were necessary to build an awards site to reward webmasters for outstanding effort, and to guide those in quest of perfection. By offering free tips and Tutorials, we have hoped to be of some kind of assistance - a plan that seems to work! Development on the new 100 point criteria started back in September 1999, only to be introduced by April 12th 2000, when our awards program was finally re-introduced under a new name - "The Maestro Awards of Excellence".

The name Maestro

Our program lend its name from two sources: our former website title "PC-Music" and something that would mean master or leader. Eventually I've found a word that would resemble exactly what I intended: "Maestro". Ever since, this single word became the stepping stone for this program's future developments and intended purpose:

• Showing leadership, directing awards to a new era
• Award those at the top level of their adept, and
• Directing others to achieve the level of "Master"

For those interested to see previous designs of the Maestro Awards and PC-Music's website, we ask for your patience. We are currently working on the tour through time!

3 Years of Silence...

Maestro Awards was put "on hold" for at least 3 years due to major problems with our hosting company. Our host was declared insolvent late 2003, and although the site remained online and appeared working all along, we were ever since unable to do anything about the website, do updates and receive applications. In August 2005 the site was relocated to another host, but we still had problems to get the site working from day one. To much damage was done.

The Future

Maestro Awards are now located on our own server, meaning that we host our own site, domain and mail services. In addition, the site needed major restructuring and a fresher appeal, appearance and some updated content. We are now done with the appeal issue, and are now looking forward to continue our successful awards program - starting end January 2007!