Hello everybody! We’re finally back with our contest results –  I am apologising it took so long, but wasn’t easy to gather all results from Facebook, Twitter, comments –  decide which prizes get each winner and finally putting that all together and contacting all our kind sponsors. Holiday season also didn’t help to get job done faster..:)

Huh, okay, but to move on –  finally results are announced and you can check if you’re one of the winners in the list by reading further. Don’t worry we are contacting everybody even if we didn’t get your email –  expect for Twitter private messages or Facebook message so we can be sure you receive your prize as supposed.

About contest generally –  I really enjoyed your suggestions, tips, complains about design and overall support. We are and we will listen to our readers even more and if you have any more tips or you just want to chat with me directly, please check our  Twitter profile @1stwebdesigner. I am responding there directly now, promising to be more active –  just updating what I and our 1WD team are up to, what we are updating, sharing new ideas and yes –  if you have any question to me, ask there, I will always respond to help out.

OK, now I am answering to actual complains officially and I am happy to tell we fixed several issues already:

1. Logo

As you may notice, we changed current logo to temporary one to let everybody know it will change real soon. How we will do that? Idea is to launch a new contest ( probably after 1–2 weeks) where we will ask to our own readers to design new logo for 1stwebdesigner. Of course winner will get very nice prize as 300$ + iPod, which should be motivating.

Even in case we don’t get any good submissions, we will hire professional logo designer who will design logo anyway, but I am really hoping on our designer audience –  I am sure you can come up with some great ideas and see your own designed on 1stwebdesigner daily!

2. Twitter Stream

We listened and agreed, Twitter stream was way too long so we decreased update count from 15 to 10. You may also notice we took off also our Partners and Ads section to clean up our sidebar.

3. Further Reading Related Posts

There were a lot of complains, that it takes too long to scroll down to comment section and we changed featured images from 570x300px to 150x150px images which saves space greatly now. Now also related post should be really RELATED because we implemented custom code which searches related posts after first 2 tags or we select them manually –  before we used WordPress default results and they weren’t really appropriate, because usually WP filters posts just by date.

Such problems we have also with default WordPress search –  we’re searching for solution there too.

4. Social Bookmarking Sliding Sharing Bar

Sliding effect seemed to distract a lot of readers and they reported that in comments as well, so we removed sliding effect and just implemented customized Sharebar plugin, no more sliding –  no more distractions from article content!

Spacing also has been added when Sharing bar is appearing in comment section –  it should be ok on all screens now.

5. Premium Membership

Even before membership release there were complains about prizing and how useful it will be so we decided not just add usual membership, we are thinking now more about our own products like handy plugins, WordPress themes, ebooks –  maybe nifty software. Membership sites seems to be more than enough in design community already, we don’t want to be yet another design blog. Soon we’ll announce our future plans and change announcements!

Other issues and comments

About other announcements now you can also use www.1wd.co address so if you’re visiting site directly, now it should be less pain to visit our website, we are currently working on implementing our own URL shortener now!

Well, and talking about article structure and regularity –  we have hired 2 more fulltime writers and one more SEO/Social Marking person, we got also first PSD TO HTML tutorial from Ahmad, and yes –  I hope you enjoy regular Photoshop Web Layout tutorials from Michael Burns. We have also one more surprise –  soon you will see the 1^st art directed post here and we will cover also some design news, review some cool new sites/services so you don’t need to visit many other sources to be aware of what’s happening in design world.

Currently I am negotiating with proofreader, I hope we’ll get one real soon so finally no-one would complain about bad language, because many of our writers, including me aren’t native English-speaking and for readers from USA and UK some article quality may seem too low –  we will solve this problem real soon!

You should also feel how our article quality is increasing, we’re spending a lot more time into article idea research and actual writing process –  spending quality time there and trying to avoid from general list posts :) There will be occasional resource articles, but not so much as before, we are mixing everything together –  list posts, educational tutorials, tips/tricks articles and some well researched case studies.
We’re working hard, but we still need your feedback, we want to create functional site, we have a team to work on new features –  help us, share your idea here in Twitter, in comments or join our Facebook group and post updates there!

1WD 2 Year Anniversary And Massive 6000$ Worth Giveaway Contest Results

Okay, enough waiting - let’s start with winners announcements! You asked for it, here it is –  congratulations to all winners, I think every loyal reader who left nice feedback got prize –  thank you all for such a huge activity and good wishes!

1000$ Worth Giftcards From CodeMyConcept PSD To HTML Service Company

1. rorchachdesign
2. Sergei Tatarinov
3. Chris

5 Premium HTML Licenses Worth 500$ From SlideshowBox

1. Martin
2. Zachary A. Mau
3. Thinkjayant
4. Dumazz
5. Romulo Aguiar Figueiredo

500 Die Cut Business Cards for 3 Lucky Winners ( Worth 250$)

1. Demitra Mroncz
2. Rahul
3. Steverobillard

5 Yearly Subscriptions from Azigos (Worth 100$)

1. Tomas Lau
2. Shrikrishna Meena
3. Michael @ Project Center
4. Sarah Schager
5. Belinda VanBuskirk

Win 100$ Off Custom Stickers : 5 Winners ( Worth 500$)

1. Kristi Hines
2. Zach Mau
3. Pablolarah
4. Kerry
5. Clara

3 Single User Licenses From MagicMembers (Worth 300$)

1. Thomas Varil
2. Adim Subedi
3. Arun Prabu

Eleven 2 GiveAway 1 Year of Free hosting To 5 People (Worth 500$)

1. Mehdi Raza Jaffery
2. George Elias
3. Thomas Elkhart
4. Nikunj
5. Ari Arsyadi

3 Individual Theme/Support Packages of Winner’s Choice From StudioPress (Worth 240$)

1. Tim Soulo
2. Satrya Bima
3. Edmund Ng

KreativeThemes 5 Themes Giveaway of Winner’s Choice ( Worth 350$)

1. Hitgirl
2. Yuni Ardita S.D
3. Adam Majchrzak
4. Kiraly Tamas
5. Christie

Iconshocks Giveaway: 3 Bundle Licenses of Your Choice (Worth 700$)

1. Lee Gustin
2. Adrian
3. Paddsolutions

3 ProThemeDesign Themes Giveaway of Winner’s Choice (Worth 240$)

1. Irina
2. AnotherBlogger
3. Matt L.

5 Templatic Premium Theme Single Use Licenses Giveaway of Winner’s Choice (Worth 450$)

1. Abdelhadi Touil
2. Francois
3. Sumon Seleem
4. David Mejias
5. Jacob S. Campion

5 GabFire Themes Premium WordPress Themes Giveaway of Winner’s Choice (Worth 300$)

1. Ilona Andrews
2. Digital Imagination
3. crunchynow
4. Bligbook
5. Athul Jayaram

ElegantBanners Giveaway: 3 Custom Banner Ad Packages (Worth $336)

1. M Pike
2. PamS
3. Stephanie Haw

Those who shared just their twitter accounts or Facebook pages, make sure to contact me dainis [at] 1stwebdesigner.com – I will write you on Twitter,Facebook directly, but I need your responses!

Congratulations to all the winners, I really hope you enjoyed this contest as much as I did!