The Association of Support Professionals (ASP) has announced the winners of its eleventh annual "Ten Best Web Support Sites" competition, a prestigious award that showcases excellence in online service and support. The announcement was made at the Services Industry Summit in Charleston, S.C., at a ceremony on April 22.

The 2008 winners include (in alphabetical order) eight Open Division entries—-Check Point Software Technologies, Cisco Systems, Dell, Intuit, Juniper Networks, McAfee, Mentor Graphics, and Novell. In addition, two companies—Articulate and MadCap Software—were named winners in the Small Company Division.

Novell was also named to the ASP's Web Support Hall of Fame, which honors sites that have been named among the "Ten Best" for at least four years.

The award winners were selected by a panel of judges with expertise in Web support design and implementation, using a scoring system based on 25 separate performance criteria. The evaluation process covers the following areas:

* Overall usability, design, and navigation
* Knowledgebase and search implementation
* Interactive features
* Customer experience
* The major site development challenge

The ten winning sites will be profiled in a book called "The Ten Best Web Support Sites of 2008," to be published by the ASP in June.

"As these ten sites demonstrate, Web support has come a long, long way in the past decade," says ASP executive director Jeffrey Tarter. "The industry has learned how to deliver a huge amount of information and support services in a form that delights customers--and every year, the standard of excellence rises even higher."

The Association of Support Professionals is an international membership organization for customer support managers and professionals. In addition to its annual "Ten Best" awards, the ASP publishes research reports on a wide range of support topics, including support compensation, services marketing, and fee-based support. www.asponline.com