It’s not often you see a design contest that doesn’t involve days of design work and crappy prizes.

Lunarpages Web Hosting are running a second series of their WordPress design contest. The prizes are actually really fantastic:

First Prize is $1,000 cash and 5 years free hosting (Basic Plan)

Second Prize is 3 years free hosting + $300 cash

Third Prize is 1 year free hosting + $100 cash

And, they have changed the voting system for this series because previously there were some cheaters, spammers “designers” who were getting votes in a questionable way.

The voting is still open to the community where each week 5 designs are chosen and the winner of that round gets into the final 12, however now rather than just the community deciding the finalist, Lunarpages staff now also vote and choose the entry. This is good because it really will prevent cheating and ensure an honest result.

Next week round 4 of voting begins, however it’s not too late to enter your theme. New submission entries close on June 22, 2008 and the best part is, Lunarpages do not require you to edit your links, or mention them in the footer of your theme.

After the contest ends, Lunarpages will post your theme on a free themes page for their 150,000+ webmasters, so it’s a great way to get your design exposed.

So what are you waiting for? Enter now!

I’m releasing the previous Design Reverb theme free for your use!

D-R 1.0 is a clean and simple 2 column theme, works with Wordpress 2.0+ and has areas for Google Adsense and/or Amazon affiliate ads.

Download dr_1.zip

This theme is not widgetized. If you want to widgetize it, just read up at the Wordpress site, though you may have to edit the css.

D-R 1.0 uses the following plugins to work correctly:

Gravatar - for the comment avatars.

Related Posts - for the related post section of each post.

I won’t be giving any support for it though, it is released as is.

I do ask that you leave the “Created By Design Reverb” in the footer.

Other than that, use it as you will and enjoy!

I worked on and uploaded a new theme last night. Till about midnight to be exact.

“Progress is a much better goal than perfection”

I’ve worked on this layout it seems forever, tweaking this, moving that. The previous theme was really getting old to me, it has only been up for 2 years, but I have always wanted to do more with it. Unfortunately due to time restraints and working on client projects, that just doesn’t seem to be happening. I guess it’s better to have too much work than not enough.

So in hopes of motivating me to work more on it, I present to you, for your consideration: Design Reverb 3.0.