Vote on your preferred design proposal

By Manuel Lemos

manuellemos.net

<email contact>

Contents

* Great participation

* Quality of the proposals

* Voting

* Please comment the proposals

* Contest results


* Great participation

The period for submitting new design proposal has ended. It has finally come the moment that many designers were expecting: the voting period.

The participation was awesome. Since the contest was opened for submission 628 new design proposals were created. Most of them were from people that were trying the design submission system.

43 proposal were submitted but some had issues and were rejected. Since the authors of those did not show interest in fixing the issues, only 34 were approved for the contest.

I have to confess that I was not expecting such a great participation. What happened is that only in the last week before of the original deadline of November 30, 3 proposal were submitted and approved.

I thought that the contest did not raise much interest. However, some authors asked for more time and the deadline was extended until December 15. Fortunately that helped many more designers to submit their proposals.

I think many of the contestants needed to see other proposals to feel compelled in participating. That is a very interesting aspect that I learned.


* Quality of the proposals

I have to congratulate all that made it here. Submitting a design proposal is not hard. What is hard is to make a good proposal that appeals to many users.

Probably making good HTML and CSS templates was not the hardest part of the job. Providing nice replacements for the site icons is probably what takes more effort. That is because they are so many icons that could be replaced. Only a few proposals include replacements for most of the icons.

There seems to be so many good proposals. I regret the fact that it will not be possible to provide prizes for all contestants. For those that may not get any prize, I hope at least the participation in the contest was a rewarding experience by itself.


* Voting

Lets move on to the voting process. Everybody can vote. But only one vote per person counts.

To vote just go to the design themes listing page and click to view the first proposal.

phpclasses.org/design/

There you may find a button to vote on that proposal if you like it. You also see a form that lets you try the design in different screen sizes, different site pages, and as different types of users: anonymous, logged and premium users.

There are also buttons to move on to the next and eventually to the previous proposal. You can vote on any proposal you like.

If you already votes on one proposal, you can change your vote anytime until the voting period deadline is reached on December 31. If you vote more than once, the previous vote will be discarded.

If you are contestant, you can vote on yourself. That is what most likely every contestant will do. But you can also vote on another proposal if you think the another looks better.

As a contestant, the only thing you cannot do is to create fake accounts to vote on your own proposal. The site is ready to detect this situation.

You can also campaign for your proposal. You can ask people to vote on your proposal, but do not do it in the wrong forums.

Also keep in mind that it does not make sense to ask people to vote if they are not regular users of the site.

This contest is for improving the site design to make it better for its users. Asking for votes from users that do not use the site is not helpful.


* Please comment the proposals

Your participation is very important even if you did not submit a proposal.

Voting is the main way for you to participate. This contest was created in order to improve the site design and provide greater user satisfaction.

This is your opportunity to help improving the site design. If you omit yourself now, you cannot complain later. Vote for design you think it is the best and you have done the minimum that any concerned user should do.

If you do not find a proposal that you like or for some reason you do not want the current design to be changed, there is an entry for the current site theme that you can vote.

Not that I expect many votes on that entry. It is just that I think it is important to listen those that may not be interesting in changing the site as it is now.

Regardless of your choice, you can do more than just voting. You can comment all the proposals that were submitted.

You can comment as many proposals as you like, but if you do, avoid being negative. I mean, you can point things that could be better, but keep in mind that all contestants are human beings.

Many of them are anxious and hope to have their work appreciated. If you have nothing good to say about a certain proposal, it is just better to not say anything.

On the other hand, if you are very enthusiastic about a certain proposal, you are free to express it by posting a comment in its own forum.

Try to highlight the things that you appreciate details that you liked in proposal. That will help other users to notice details that may also be relevant to them.

If you really would like a certain proposal to win, please do not campaign against other proposals. We are all grown up people here. So, lets keep this contest civilized and respectful.


* Contest results

The results of this contest will be announced in January. Until then, no partial results will be announced. That is meant to avoid influencing in favor of proposals that may be ahead in the poll in a certain moment.

The final winner must get at least 50% of the votes. Since there are so many contestants, it is very likely that the winner will not get the necessary votes in this turn. In that case, there will be a second turn between the two most voted proposals.

I have not yet decided whether about the deadline of the eventual second turn. I am considering to give final contestants the chance to improve their proposals based on the feedback they got from the users. What do you think? I am open to opinions.

Other than that, if you have other questions or doubts, feel free to post a comment here.