Prizes range from a $125 Twitter Identity Package, to a $25 department store gift card. Sweet!

Kiesha Easley, technical writer and former English teacher, is running the contest. Her blog is beautifully designed and filled with great insights and encouragement for bloggers. You’ll find it hard to tear yourself away once you arrive to check out contest details.

Support the contest and fellow bloggers. If you don’t have time to write an entry, at least read a few guest posts and re-tweet your favorite.

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PSD Designs

Weebly is looking for layered PSD designs, which they will convert for use on their platform. Contest entries require no HTML or CSS coding.

Expert Panel of Judges

A panel of design experts will select 10 finalists. Then Weebly users will vote on the finalists to determine the winners. First Place wins $10,000, Second Place receives $2,000, and Third Place gets $1,000.

Opportunity Beyond Winning

Even entries that do not win, may have a chance of being adopted into Weebly’s collection of free themes made available to their users. Such themes include a link to the designer’s profile page with their website/portfolio address, and designer credit is given in the theme’s source code.

There’s opportunity for many with this theme design contest. Watch a video about the competition and get more details at the contest site. The deadline to enter is April 30, 2010.

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Press sells for $50, making it the most expensive theme I’ve personally used. The old adage, you get what you pay for, holds true. It was a delight to install and configure the basics in under an hour at àlaBuzz Info.

Easy

From the simple theme options interface, I popped in my logo exactly like adding an image to a post. (No theme PSD files to fiddle with, no server upload, just easy-peasy.) I set up the menu structure. Then I entered text in the “Custom About Us” box, and added my IDs for the social media link list; both niceties automatically appear in the left side of the footer.

Customizable

From the widgets admin page, I positioned Twitter Stream in the 3rd footer position, and added a blogroll in the 4th. While I was doing this, I was surprised to discover that the home page featured content is managed by widgets:

• Large Slider Widget
• Dual Column Widget
• Multi Column Widget

This allows great layout flexibility. In fact, Press is highly adaptable in style to suit the tone of any blog. It’s there in an understated way that elegantly supports vivid content presentation.

Inspiring

When I have a chance, I’ll apply the featured posts slider (that holds images or videos) and explore the built-in gallery (which can also be used as a portfolio or product listing page.) Based on my experience with Press so far, I’m confident using these features will flow intuitively. Meanwhile, àlaBuzz Info looks rather fine and functions well, virtually out-of-the-box!

Let me end by thanking the good people at ThemeGrade for their contest, and the generous folks at Obox for being one of the sponsors. They’ve heightened my state of blogging bliss. This wonderful theme, that has unexpectedly dropped into my hands, is inspiring. It’s the kind of theme that draws on your creativity, just to do it justice.

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Both free and paid themes are tested, and ranked Gold, Silver, or Bronze. ThemeGrade provides a handy search function that allows you to look for themes according to free or paid, structure, category and ranking. Finally, you can gain insight into how well a theme may work, before you invest time installing and configuring it for your site.

Popular Premium Themes

ThemeGrade regularly features several popular premium theme companies: ElegantThemes, WooThemes, StudioPress, and more. Since I use ElegantThemes myself, I find it gratifying that most of them receive pretty high grades (although none have yet scored 100%). You can join ElegantThemes for only $19.99 a year, which grants you use of all of the themes and access to the support forum. It’s a great deal. The themes are strikingly attractive, many themes are designed to fulfill the primary function of various types of sites (design portfolio, video, photography, business, etc.), and new themes are continually added to the mix at a prolific rate. Should you win the ThemeGrade contest, definitely consider the one-year ElegantThemes membership for your prize!

However, since I already belong to ElegantThemes, should I be a contest winner, I’d love to try out “Optimize” from WooThemes. It looks perfect for featuring products, with a video player right in the header. The site slogan and description fit neatly to the right. Nicely done!

Enter to Win Contest

Now it’s your turn to study the premium WordPress themes offered as prizes. Go to ThemeGrade to link to them, as well as to learn more about the contest. You’ll need to write a post and follow a few simple rules. Have fun, and the best of luck!

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