We've published a new version of our FAQ, one that explains many of the questions that people have about video and photo contests, and how to use the Strutta platform.

We've divided up into two sections; one for contest creators, and one for entrants/voters. We expect that it will see many revisions and additions, based on your feedback. Hope you like it. If you don't see your question, submit it to us using our contact form.

A recent "design your office space" contest here at HQ inspired us to do something cool and drastic with the wall here in our office.

The result is a very cool chalkboard, complete with chalk drawings of familair characters. Steven masterminded the design, and recorded a timelapse of the wall's completion:

Strutta Art Wall Timelapse HD from Steven Wittens on Vimeo.

The resulting mural is very cool, and we all agree it improves the ambiance in the room considerably. We invite your comments and feedback!

The finished product:

Strutta's online contest platform is now truly international. You can build and design your own online contests with user generated content, and open them up to any countries in the world you wish:

When we first launched our do-it-yourself contest platform in December, we agreed that we would continue to develop features based on popular demand.

Not surprisingly, our software has caught the attention of marketers the world over, many of whom were looking forward to hosting Strutta contests in their own countries. Our latest feature satisfies this demand, and lets contest creators select the regions they want included in their contest.

Important note: This change is more than just the addition of a dropbox containing a list of countries. Regions outside of the ones specified by the contest creator will be able to view the contest, but will be prevented from entering; their IPs blocked by a filter based on their geography. Additionally, the rules document that is included with all contest created with the software will continue to protect the interests of competitiors and their content, voters, and the contest creators in the regions they specify.

Have you tried building your own contest yet? You can try it for free- just click this link and select the "Basic" option to get started. Need help? The screencast on the homepage will help.

The winners have been announced, and our own Danny Robinson, Strutta CEO has been selected as one of the recipients of the PopVox Awards.

Strutta hosted the voting platform for the popular choice categories, and the Georgia Straight has already published the list of all of the winners. Four juried awards were given out to Individual Standouts as well, and Danny was recognized as the top Industry Advocate. Here's Danny with a few words following the acceptance of the award:

Want to snatch up some tickets to Launch Party Vancouver 7? There are still a few available.

On behalf of our whole team here, we'd like to thank New Media BC, especially Kirstin Richter, for working with us on the voting site, and to the rest of the jury for thier wise selection in the Industry Advocate category.

Of all of the services that we offer as part of our online contest software, it is our secure voting process and user verification that set us apart.

Settling on a user-friendly, safe and easy voting method has not been easy, though. In fact, since our launch in late December, we've made two major improvements to it, and completely redesigned the "look" of the process twice as well.

We thought it would be fitting to share a little "behind the scenes" of how our newest voting flow came to be. First, a little history, provide by our Senior Architect, Steven Wittens:

All of Strutta is built on top of the open source Drupal system. This is a popular platform that runs some of the most trafficked sites on the web. In particular, we use the Drupal Voting API module to tabulate our votes, which is a tried and true solution. The code for all of this is freely available at Drupal.org for review.

On top of Drupal's own high quality code, we add some additional measures to ensure fairness.  Firstly, we require all accounts to be signed up with a valid (and verified) e-mail address, and we have several safeguards in place to prevent abuse of common e-mail services. Secondly, our entry browsing system equalizes exposure for all contest entries, regardless of when they were added. When we present random entries to content voters, our system prioritizes those entries that have been viewed the least. Thus everyone gets a fair share of exposure, and the benefit you get from submitting early is minimized.

With a few notes about how this has been implemented on our site for the latest version of the voting process, here's Senior Developer Mike Holly:

Our users are required to verify their accounts (by clicking an activation link sent in an email) before voting. In an effort to streamline the registration process as much as possible, and provide "instant gratification" to our users, we initially decided to record all votes immediately. However, as users often failed to verify their accounts, unconfirmed votes were removed from the system after a certain amount of time. Unfortunately, this led to a great deal of confusion amongst our users, as decreases in vote counts were perceived as errors in the system.

We're glad to announce that we have resolved these usability issues and have run the new system through extensive usability tests. With the new system, anonymous users must still register when voting or submitting entries, but, this time around, all new votes and entries are kept in a "pending" state until the user clicks the email verification link. When the verification link is clicked, the user is notified that their votes have been made permanent and finally redirected back to the contest site. Once at the site, the user can clearly see that their vote has been recorded. We're hoping that these changes help make our system as transparent and usable as possible.

Thank you Mike, for that very clear and candid explanation. Even with all of this carefully considered development and execution, our system still needs a "front end;" what we in the internet business refer to as the "user experience. Tha masterful artist behind what you see in this most excellent voting process is none other than Ross Howard-Jones. Here's "HoJo" with a few words about the look and feel:

We really wanted to clean up the login/register iframe (the registration box that appears) within our competition platform to help with user flow and clarity. The first version wasn't quite as flexible as we needed it to be. We kept on running into issues of the size of the iframe, so one one the first things we improved was to have the iframe expandable.

The second was the look of the iframe. The design was simple, but still felt out of place when initiated within one of the unique themes that our users had come up with. We needed something that would work well across the board with all of the themes. We came up with a even simpler design that incorporates transparencies to blend with the theme behind it. This seems to keep the user's experience more seamless.

The last thing was to improve not only the language within the iframe but also position of the copy to make everything more obvious to the user. The user's actions now flow together to make everything feel a bit more linear and supported.

So you can see that a great deal of work and preparation go into something that is meant to seem intuitive and easy. That's the challenge; building a tool that is accessible to all levels of internet users, and that is low-friction for people to enter contests and cast their votes.

We've also been asked several times about "single sign-on" for member sites, and other methods of verifying identity  and we are exploring all of them, especially for our pending API.

We're pleased with this latest iteration of the voting process, but we know it's not likely the last change we'll ever make. As always, we invite your feedback. Let us know what you think in the comments, or hit us up using our contact info below.

And as always, you can follow us on Twitter at Twitter.com/strutta.