2004-05-14 12:00:00

HTML Design Guru Bake-Off

A couple of days ago, I put out a call for HTML freelancers. The good news is that we received a lot of responses. The bad news is that we received a LOT of responses. We are overwhelmed and are unable to choose between so many capable designers.

We have therefore decided to proceed with a contest. Background and details follow below.

SourceGear is working on a web-based bug-tracking product called Dragnet. This product is basically a port of our existing bug-tracking product to ASP.NET. Dragnet will be released in the late [Illinois] summer timeframe and will support full integration with SourceGear Vault and SourceOffSite.  Demos of Dragnet will be shown in the SourceGear booth at Tech-Ed in San Diego.

The zip file attached below to this posting contains several HTML pages, plus their supporting images and a CSS style sheet. In a nutshell, the challenge is to take these pages and make them look great.

One of the submitted entries will be selected as the winner and will be integrated into Dragnet. (Practically speaking, we will "diff" your submitted files against the contents of the original zip file and apply those changes to the ASP.NET scripts.)

Contest rules:

1. To enter the contest, send us a zip file containing your modified version of these pages. Put your name somewhere in the name of the zip file you send us. You may be able to get the job done simply by replacing the style sheet, but you can modify the HTML itself or the images if you want.
   
   
2. You can submit multiple entries if you want. Please place each entry in a separate zip file.
   
   
3. Entries must be emailed to contest@sourcegear.com by midnight Chicago time on 28 May 2004. The winner will be announced on or before 18 June.
   
   
4. All entrants will be mentioned, thanked and linked on my weblog. Make sure you include a URL along with your entry so I know where to link you.
   
   
5. The winner will receive:
   • USD $5,000
   • glowing praise here on my weblog 
   • mention in the Dragnet product documentation
     
     
6. Selection of the winner is entirely at the discretion of the SourceGear staff. Entries may be judged on visual appearance, cleanliness of the underlying HTML/CSS, standards compliance, compatibility with IE and Mozilla, bandwidth usage required, and ease of integration into Dragnet.
   
   
7. The winner will be required to submit a mailing address so that we can send a check with the prize money. If you are in the United States and are entering as an individual, we will need your social security number so we can report your winnings to the IRS as income (sorry).
   
   
8. We reserve the right to cancel the contest if we do not receive at least 10 entries.
   
   
9. All submitted entries become the property of SourceGear LLC.
   
   
10. Employees of SourceGear LLC and their immediate family members are not eligible for this contest.
    

If you plan to submit an entry, please drop me an email.  We'd like to start getting a sense for how many entries there will be.

Good luck!

Please note:  This product was previously being referred to by its internal code-name, which was "Mantis".  Now that the actual product name is decided, that name won't be used anymore, except for residual traces left in the zip file containing the contest materials.  Our apologies for any confusion caused with respect to the open source bug-tracking tool by that name.

Attachments:

mantis_contest.zip

54 KB