A new contest launches every other week and two contests are always active at once. The contests go through a series of stages:
- Announcement & Submission These are also accompanied by a blog post announcing the current contest
- Community chooses or calls dibs on N number of recipes to vote and recipes go to test kitchen
- Two finalists are chosen and 6 - 10 community picks are chosen during the first round of community testing. Two finalists and 4 - 6 community picks are shot by F52 then voting begins A blog post announces that finalists have been chosen
- The winning contest page lists the winner and runner up along with the community pics A Q&A and post is written for this.
Do blog articles announcing the current contest unpublish after the contest's status has been changed to voting or finished?
You mentioned that only 4-6 community picks have their photos taken and the other community picks do not have photos attached to them. Although this page looks like each submission is showing a photo, even if some are ugly. Unless I'm confusing All Entries from Community Picks.
The index page lives at /contests and is a landing page that has previous, current and voting contests as well as wildcard and community picks and a way to find out more about the contests
Landing Page Priorities
- Surfacing old contests through the contests themselves, community picks and wildcard buckets
- What contest is currently being voted on
- The contest that is accepting submissions
- The contest that is in the Test Kitchen waiting to have finalists/community picks chosen
- Other contest-related content such as Winner Q&As, About Our Contests
The show page is where a contest lives and lists its state: accepting submissions; in the test kitchen; voting; winner. The show page looks slightly different when users are voting and when voting is finished compared to when a recipe is in the test kitchen or accepting submissions. Voting/winner states feature two finalists with the community picks below.
Are contests only sponsored when they're being voted on? Is this the community picks section?
The archive is a paginated page that lists all previous contests
The about page lists the rules and process
We can show previous wildcard and community picks archive pages as selected filters on the recipe page. We currently have a filter for community picks, but not wildcard winners.
I also did some more poking around to find some other sites that have well design contests. I didn't find a ton, but the web design site Awwwards has a few nice pages: