From January 1-31, ThemeForest hosted a fierce site template competition. Our authors competed against one another to win $300 - as well as some helpful promotion.

After much thought and deliberation, the winners were selected early in February! Trust me when I say that this wasn’t an easy task - by any means! So without further ado, here are the best ten site templates from our “$3000 New Year Competition”, in no particular order. I hope more of you will consider entering our upcoming ThemeForest competitions. Be sure to check the site regularly, as we host a new one each month!

• Live Performance Premium Template

  

  “We built the Live Performance Template based on the 960 Grid System (http://www.960.gs) to suit those in need of a website template for their band, group, comedy tour, venue, or anything requiring a schedule, really.”

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• Great Portfolio

  

  “Great Portfolio is a one page portfolio and a very clean template. It has 2 color options to choose from namely, dark blue, and dark brown. It also has a smooth scroller to each menu of the page. Contact Form is functional and ready to use.”

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• Portfolium

  

  “Portfolium is aimed at creative professionals including but not only : graphic and web designers, photographers, developers and artists of any kind. It puts accent on your work and features a nice jquery slider on the homepage.”

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• Coffee

  

  “This theme is a fixed layout based on 960px grid. It uses no tables for layout. The main page has three columns whereas sub pages have the left-most columns merged.”

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• Business Portfolio 960

  

  “I built this Business Portfolio template based on the 960 Grid System. It’s one of the few templates on ThemeForest that are based on this system and it’s just one of the many things that makes it unique.”

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• Ultimate Animated Portfolio

  

  “This is a complete, fully featured, animated portfolio template that includes two skins, a dark one (black/blue/orange) and a bright one (white, gray, blue).”

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• Core 3

  

  “The Core 3 template is very simple, clean and effective. It is incredibly easy to modify and can easily be used for business or personal. Theme coding is very well commented and easy to read.”

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• Business | Portfolio + Blog

  

  “A stylish design ideal for a web dev company or a business. The design can be modified to work with other types of websites, such as a blog. And you don’t need to worry about fonts! This design uses only one font, I bet you’ve heard about Lucida. I’m draw this illustration (apples).”

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• Silver Spoon

  

  “This is a modern template which uses a lot of jQuery and CSS to create great user experience.”

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• Nothern Lights

  

  “An amazing colorful and very functional site template that can be used for general business or a sweet portfolio.”

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And there you have it! We considered many factors when making our choices.

• Practicality: How “real world” is it?
• Uniqueness: Does this template stand out among the others?
• Sales: How many sales has this template made, per day?
• Construction: Does the template validate and follow best practices?
• Options: Did the author supply different CSS “themes” for each template? Has extra value been added?

Popularity: 5% [?]