wpressd.com

For this one, we really, really liked John O’Nolan’s suggestion to create a Digg-style platform for niche WordPress content. There are a whole bunch of WP content aggregators out there, but none that offers a little bit of community contribution & involvement; so we’re sure that this will be a great idea. Congrats John!

wpmag.com

For this one, we had to think a little longer as there were many great suggestions… In the end, we decided to award it to Mark Bailey for his in-depth plan of action. We just got the feeling that he’s going to do a great job of building a community around wpmag.com and the community is really lacking some top-notch WP content sites.

So congrats to both John & Mark… Please drop us an e-mail on info[at]woothemes.com and we’ll get those domains moved over to you ASAP.

Obviously with a competition of this nature, there’ll be some people who walk away as winners and others who’ll get another opportunity to win next time (there’s no such thing as losers in our book). We have decided to award a 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize, whilst we have also contacted another 7 designers to buy their submissions. This will then make out our Top 10.

Before we get to the winners, we’d also like to thank Elliot Jay Stocks, Liam McKay, Brian Gardner & Jason Schuller for acting as guest judges and providing us with some valuable input. We considered their votes, along with ours to finalize the following list:

1. The Groovy Series by izuddin.helmi – $2000 Winner!

Choosing the ultimate winner for a contest like this, is never easy – but with three great variations in the series, we absolutely had to pick this one! We love the style, customizability and the different layouts, which ultimately clinched the first prize in our minds.

2. myweblog by Spencer.Gurnk – $1000 Winner!

We think this concept is a typical WooThemes design and that’s probably the reason why we like it so much. They say that one shouldn’t “try fix something when it’s not broken“, so this slick theme will fit into the hugely popular WooThemes theme recipe book easily and we believe that it’ll proof just as popular with our users.

3. Store WooTheme by jonikox – $500 Winner!

With our recent push to get into the commerce / business themes market, we think this one will go down really well. The grunge design is definitely popular and we’ll be sure to add a few more styles to the design before it’s ready for release.

4. Irresistible by izuddin.helmi

There’s something truly mystical about this design and we love it. We’re sure that with a bunch of different colour schemes, this theme can turn into one of the most popular themes on WooThemes.

5. Prouder Studio by thecraigvine

Another design that can count itself unlucky that it didn’t make it into the Top 3. Irrespective though, we’d love to develop this theme and add it to our growing list of portfolio themes.

Completing the Top 10…

Then, in no particular order, here are 5 more outstanding submissions, which just didn’t make our Top 5. We have already contacted these designers about purchasing their concepts, since we’d love to develop these and add them to the WooThemes stable.

• Newsport by Armono Wibowo
• Bloggingstream by fir.da.us
• TypeBased by Armono Wibowo
• Gotham News by onvo
• Personal Blog Theme by onvo

So a big congrats to all the designers that have made it into our Top 10 and especially to the three winning designers for their amazing concepts! What do you think? Do you like the designs we picked? Or do you think we missed one of your favourites?