Judges are selected from within and outside the WordPress theme community. Participants may not be judges. Judges should have proven web design backgrounds and possess the ability to articulate and explain aesthetics-based decisions. Essentially judges must be credible.
Judges will view the designs on a secured preview site where the identities of participants will be concealed, but the source of their CSS will of course be available. The content of this site will be exactly the same as the Sandbox Live Preview and is also available to download, sndbx-dummy-content.zip.
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Judging Outline
- CSS will be validated using http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/; validation is strongly encouraged.
- Designs will be judged on overall experience and judgements will be based on quantifiable and qualifiable opinions.
- Designs will be judged using latest stable version of WordPress and standardized dummy blog content.
- Designs will be judged using stable releases of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
In addition but not limited to the judging outlines above, more specific criteria that may be considered at the discretion of the judges will be:
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Judging Criteria
- appropriateness of elements
- completeness of design
- editorial judgment in design
- effective use of color
- effective use of typography
- quality of style sheet coding
- uniqueness/originality of design
Judges will be asked to provide a short, one- to two-sentence statement as to their decisions for first, second, and third places, and runner-up. After explicit permission is sought from a judge, this statement may be provided, with or without attribution per request of the judge, with the results. This provides an additional qualifiable element to the results in addition to the quantifiable scoring (see Judging Procedures).
