Actually the first award I received was a prize rather than an award. My site had been on the Net for about a month when CLEAR Net, my ISP, announced a competition for the Best Personal Home Page, the prize being a top-of-the-range 56K modem. Although I knew I would be up against people using more sophisticated technology (such as JavaScript and fancy forms) than that available to me, I figured I had nothing to lose by entering: all it required was a brief visit to Clears site and nomination by email to Clears Webmaster. And the prize was really worthwhile, especially as my modem was not only second-hand (a loan from a friend) but also very slow: 14.4Kbps. I was nonplussed to learn I had won this competition! That was in 1997 and the modem concerned went out of use in July 2008 because we finally managed to get Broadband in our area. Most modems get burnt out by the horrendous rural phone lines where I live but this one is still working as good as the day it was new. But back to web awards …
If you have your own home page Im sure youd like to win some awards. But please dont steal awards from my page (or anybody elses): the people who grant them are working hard, usually in their spare time, to make the Web a safer place for you to visit and have lots of fun, and those who win the awards work almost as hard to get them. Besides, you will be breaching copyright, which is against the law. There are plenty of awards out there that you can apply for. Just do a search on google.com.
As far as I know all my awards are genuine. If I have reason to suspect an award isnt genuine Im afraid I tell the award-givers what I think of them and refuse to accept the award. If I found the award on a special awards site I then email the sites webmaster, explaining why the award is obviously not genuine, and the offender is expelled from the awards site. This might sound harsh to you but I feel its necessary to protect those who grant awards for the real purpose of web awards: a sincere desire to foster better web design.
If you dont have a home page but would like one, see my HTML Writing Tutorial page for a few tips on web site design and to download a great tutorial to teach yourself HTML. Writing your own HTML code rather than using expensive web-creation software is much easier than it looksand a lot of fun! Even if you dont publish your page you will have something worthwhile to show your friends and family that you can proudly boast you did all by yourself.