I’ve seen several posts that seemed to miss (or misunderstand) the judging criteria I posted here:
These rose to the top using a combined score of votes from the people who are putting up the prize money, your downloads, and cross-browser compatibility.
The criteria used for judging was a combination of these 3 things:
- Average of downloads per day of each style, adjusted slightly to account for total number of styles on a given day. This is a more accurate “vote” than any poll I could have put up and I didn’t have to worry about people stuffing the ballot box. The people the styles are being provided for had their say.
- The opinion of the people who kicked in the cash. I won’t say who picked what, but these choices were right in line with the download “votes”.
- I checked the top 10 styles in 6 browsers: IE 5, IE 5.5, IE 6, Mozilla Firebird (Firefox wasn’t released yet), Camino and Safari. If I noticed inconsistencies, I marked the style down a little accordingly.
I’m sure we’ll have another contest at some point and we can revisit the judging criteria for that one at that time. In the meantime, please try to remember that the point of this contest is not to win, it is to provide a collection of great styles to the WordPress community. Design is very much a matter of taste and there is no way everyone will be satisfied with the designs picked as the winners.