Design Vitality Lose Credibility (And Possibly My Entry)

Note - This had to be reposted, as I lost it during the transfer of web hosts. Along with it, I lost a handful of comments.

Bad news!

Design Vitality have just announced, that the submission date for their WordPress Theme Design Competition, has been put back to the 19th of December.

The reason they have given, is,

“A lot of people have emailed us requesting more time to complete their entries and after hearing it from so many people, we have decided to go ahead and give you one more chance to win some of the cool prizes. The last day to submit your entry is now December 19th.”

Now this wouldn’t be so bad, if it was the first time. However, it’s not. The initial submission date was November 15th, if I remember correctly, and they decided to put it off until the 3oth.

Doubts and issues

Now that they have put it off until December 19th, it creates a number of problems:

• They have, and will, lose a lot of credibility. I’m not going to string this out, but basically, it puts doubt in your mind as to whether they’re actually going to pay out.
• It makes me think that it’s possibly just a ploy in order to get a lot of links to their site. In fact, when I first came across the competition, I warned them about making people use the anchor text “WordPress Theme Design Competition“, as my good friend, David Airey, was penalized by Google, partly due to running a competition with such an entry rule. Unless I am mistaken, however, Design Vitality completely ignored (meaning, no response whatsoever) my advice.
• When you set a date for a competition, you’re always going to have people who come to the party late. So, if you keep putting the date back because a number of folks want to enter, then you’ll be going back forever! For those that just have forgotten, or put off designing their theme, well, if people really wanted to get a theme entered, they’d get it done.

That’s not all…

On top of all that, December 19th, to be quite frank, is a stupid date! Think about it. For those who have free time around that date, what are they doing? They’re not on their computers, they’re out buying Christmas presents. And assuming the voting starts on January 1st, people are still out shopping, and enjoying the last of their holidays. The blogosphere itself, will be at a lull, and there won’t be anywhere near the potential attention this competition could attract, simply because of the time of year.

Please help

I’m seriously thinking of not submitting my entry. It’s a design I’m very happy with, and I’m quite confident that it will become a popular theme. In fact, if it wasn’t that I wanted to give the prize money to charity, then I wouldn’t even be considering entering, I’d just release it to the public.

However, I’m looking for advice from my friends. Am I overreacting? Do you think I have reason to be suspicious? What would you do?

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