Announcing The Divi Showcase Contest Winners

Last Updated on February 10, 2023 by 82 Comments

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Announcing The Divi Showcase Contest Winners
Blog / Divi Resources / Announcing The Divi Showcase Contest Winners

Welcome to Day 59 of our Divi 100 Marathon. Keep tuning in for 100 days in a row of awesome Divi resources as we count down to the amazing release of Divi 3.0 on the final day of the series!


Last week we announced the 2016 Divi Showcase Contest finalists and opened up voting to the Elegant Themes community to decide which 3 websites would win 1st, 2nd and 3rd place along with over $17,000 in prizes!

Each of the 20 final websites were spectacular examples of Divi, showcasing clean, professional designs and unique approaches to using the Divi Builder; and these 20 websites were just a few of the over 2,000 websites that were submitted to the contest! The Divi community is a truly talented one to say the least, and picking only 3 winners was no easy task. The votes were close and the competition was fierce, but today we are excited to announce our winners!

First Place: Doers

doers

Doers is our first place winner, and deservedly so. Their website goes to show you the power of clean and simple design. Sometimes the most simple of designs are the hardest to create because every single design choice needs to be a good design choice lest your mistakes become glaringly evident. Doers pulled it off with stellar typography, good white space, a sophisticated sense of rhythm and just a little bit of flare in the form of fun animated gifs. As our first place winner, Arthur Lim will be walking home with a huge list of prizes thanks to our long list of generous sponsors!

The Prizes

Second Place: Pensiunea Roua Muntilor

pensiunearouamuntilor

Pensiunea Roua Muntilor is our second place winner, differentiating themselves with a fun color scheme and playful illustrated elements that speak to the retreat’s strengths and values. Their design replaces sharp edges and fine lines with organic shapes that mimic nature, and I think the Divi community was impressed by the unique style the designers were able to create. It’s a great example of the power of Divi because it shows everyone how creative you can be once you have mastered the Divi Builder’s design settings. As our second place winner, Cristian Dragos will be claiming a whole slew of goodies thanks to our awesome sponsors!

The Prizes

Third Place: Hyphen

hyphen

Our third and final winner is Hyphen, a bold and beautiful website with a standout design style filled with strong geometric elements. With a company name like “hyphen,” it’s no wonder their design is all about lines. Lines that create repeating triangles and skewed rectangles starting from the logo and continuing all the way down to the footer. It makes it a joy to scroll down the page as you follow the slanted lines from one section to another. It creates a striking contrast with our first place winner, which goes to show you that that are many ways to approach a successful website design. As our third place winner, Jenni Cabrelli will be treated to quite the pool of prizes thanks to all our lovely sponsors!

The Prizes

A Big Thanks To All The Participants

I want to say thanks to everyone who participated in this contest. Not just the contestants, but also the thousands of community members who commented their compliments and spent the time to vote and help us pick our winners. We couldn’t have done it without you! That being said, this contest isn’t just about picking three winners. It’s a way to celebrate the Divi community as whole, to showcase the power of Divi and to provide everyone with the inspiration needed to make their websites even better. I have no doubt that this contested will become a most loved yearly tradition, and I am already looking forward to seeing what wonderful websites you build next year!

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Divi 100 Day 59

The Countdown To Divi 3.0

This post is part of our Divi 100 marathon. Follow along as we post free Divi resources for 100 days in a row! This 100-day countdown will end with the game-changing release of Divi 3.0, including our brand new visual editor built from the ground up using React. Divi 3.0 will change the way you build websites with the Divi Builder forever!
Let the countdown begin.

Learn More About Divi 3.0


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82 Comments

  1. I gotta say, I love the Doers website! Thanks for sharing and congrats to everyone who made it!

  2. It’s great contest. Congratulations to all awarded!

  3. Thank you all for supporting Doers! We are over the moon here 🙂 Congrats to the other winners and finalists and thank you Elegant Themes for organizing everything. We are greatly inspired by all the awesome sites, kind words and feedback we have received from the community over the past week. It has definitely been a great ride growing with Elegant Themes since the pre Divi days. Onwards to Divi 3!

  4. Congrats to the winners. You deserved. 🙂

  5. Congratulations all! Wonderful design! Maybe someday I will participate myself.

  6. ET what an excellent way to keep the Divi fires burning and the community engaged. In addition to your inspired theme building I think it’s awesome how you continue to inspire us. Sure, everyone may not agree with the final selection but winners and losers are all engaged. And to me Divi is the winner! Go ET!

  7. Congrats to all.. Fantastic sites

  8. Doers? Really? Besides the confusing navigation of the home page, Divi doesnt even offer the option of the float in/up text areas, which is what makes Doers look neat. This is a contest showcasing Divi, dont you think the site that wins should be based off of what Divi can actually do?
    Just sayin..

    • Hi Alexis, you can actually float any section, row or modules easily with a simple hack since the animations are already built for the image modules. Simply add the relevant css classes into the elements. For example, these 2 classes “et-waypoint et_pb_animation_bottom” when added will allow your elements to float from bottom to top. Hope this tip helps 🙂

      • I wonder two things arthur. Did you force the underline in a seperate div by making a div in the code or did you style an element in the builder, if so which one? And the span for the italic text, was that custom code?

        • Hi Niels, are you referring to the short underline below the subtitle text? We basically just create a custom div and style it in child theme css. As for the span for italic text, it is a custom shuffle sequence jquery that you can find online or take a look at our codes 🙂

          • Thanks, As for the short underline, it seems you hard coded the div or was it a builder thing? Thanks again, Niels

  9. Congrats to the winners! Inspiring to see the versatility, variation, and possibilities.

    I agree to wanting to see how it was done. Maybe that could be another contest. 😉 Show a great site and submit a 3-5 min tutorial with “insights” as submission. Top three winners then need to create a 45-60 min showcase how the site was built to claim the award….

    I am just starting out with DIVI and am working myself through the documentation and the tutorials. The 100 days stuff is great, but an A-Z showcase for a good site would be ideal. If it exists let me know though, maybe I just missed it.

  10. Congratulations to the Winners and a nice comp from ET.

    I see some are expressing their Opinions quite loudly… It’s great we all have opinions and we also have a little hole that we sit on. Don’t act like that hole.

    The Winners were voted by this community.

    Great Job ET and well done to the Winners 🙂

  11. Congrats to the winners!! We’re honored to have been a part of the final twenty and look forward to building more awesome websites with Divi.

  12. Congratulations to the winners!!! Good jobs and a great inspiration to keep creating….

  13. Congratulations to the winners!!! I felt that “Hyphen” was the one that grabbed me the most, but these 3 certainly deserved recognition! They all showed Phenomenal work!

  14. Very inspiring examples!

  15. Congratulations to the winners! All of the sites were amazing and it was hard to choose. These are great examples of excellent designs!

  16. Congratulations to the winners!!! These 3 certainly deserved recognition! Fantastic work!

  17. Haters gonna hate. Congratulations to the winners! All of the sites that were featured showed the designers love and hard work. We all come to this with different levels of education, likes and dislikes and cultural backgrounds that influence what we create. Art is subjective and web design is the medium with which we choose to create.

  18. Nice and I’m happy for the winner. Howefer, the animation that ET dev team tried to play down in Design is what we are seeing being endorsed with alot of white space. Aside the animation in Doers, I didn’t see the layout as special though the content are clear to the core. Hyphen and Pensiunea Roua Muntilor are creative.

  19. Great. Congratulation to all the winners.

  20. Hyphen should have come in first, really solid site.

  21. Absolutely well-deserved! Congratulations to the winners! Simplicity is the way.

  22. Lovely use of design. Pushing the envelope to the best levels. Congrats to all the winners.

  23. I have a theory and a doubt about this, every day Elegant Themes send emails with information about how to download the zip divi-packs. Divi is the best theme in the world, and Divi 3 will be better, but I have the theory that this will make the best theme in the world so heavy, everything ET add or change to divi, required a more specialized and powerful HOSTING SERVER. And Im worried, because First Place Winner: Doers, its about the power of clean and simple design. How can be clean, and simple, and people says that is heavy as hell? Please, Im a ET Client, could you give me a couple of advice about this, I want to be ready and prepared for the future. Thanks a lot.

    • Hey Antonio, I was just like you few years back, clueless and concerned about taking the leap with Elegant Themes (before Divi even existed) but have never looked back since.

      Just like Josh say, Divi is a framework and depending on how you use it can be light or heavy (base on feedback this is certainly something we can improve on). But for a beginner, I must say it has one of the easiest builder to help kickstart your web journey. Not to mention their help forum and Facebook communities which have the friendliest people to help answer almost all your questions.

      Good luck and hope it has help answer your question in some way.

    • Antonio, I could be wrong here, but the Doers site has much more content than meets the eye. Just check out one of their excellent past project pages. Very graphic heavy. Divi can be very light or very bloated based on your needs and thrift. I suspect that if Doers is getting a low site score, they may not be on the best Hosting Plan, which I’m sure would change after winning this contest. Cheers!

      • Thank you Josh.

        You’re very kind.

        Regards,

  24. WooHoo! Doers was my choice!

  25. Deserved! 🙂

  26. Doers. Clearly, they think differently. But I have to say their work for clients is more impressive to me than their own site.

    On this page: http://doers.sg/project/clearpro/ How did they get the 6 columns with the square photos and hover changes to graphics AND links? Is that Divi? Can I do that? That’s what I want!!!

    Thanks.

    • Go to the bottom “View other works”

      • Hey Randy, as Seth has mentioned just have a full width section and you will find the full width portfolio module. The rest is CSS customized styling 🙂

      • Those are projects. And then if you use the project gallery module and make it full-width, it will add as many projects as possible to fill the width. The hover effects are custom.

  27. Congratulations to the winners! You earned the recognition and the prizes. Thanks to Elegant Themes for offering these valuable prizes and for giving the rest of us a chance to be inspired by what others have done with Divi. 🙂

  28. WOW! Now this is a nice surprise! Thank you all for voting my entry (Pensiunea Roua Muntilor). I’m really proud to be the 2nd place winner from over 2000 entries! Congrats to all the participants and especially to the other 2 winners.
    It was a lot of headache to implement the design concept specially when it comes to mobile. But in the end the result paid off and the client was very happy with our work. I would like to thank the Elegant Themes‬ community for the votes, the sponsors for the awesome prizes and of course Elegant Themes for creating Divi, the most awesome WordPress Framework.

    • Haha I know your pain pretty well Christian. Implementing great visuals on both the desktop and mobile is always a challenge especially when challenging the standard framework. But hey, you pulled it off wonderfully and it has definitely inspired me and expanded my horizon on the possibilities of Divi. Cheers 🙂

    • Your site was the most incredible combination of beautiful design and excellent UX. It was by far my favorite. Bravo!

    • Cristian, congratulations on a well-deserved 2nd place. Your website was in my top 3 vote and I am glad to see your website making top 3. Your website proves that combining creator’s imagination and creativity with authentic craft of the client can give birth to a beautiful and meaningful creation.

  29. Amazing sites, congrats to everyone! 🙂

  30. Congrats all winners. My favorite was Hyphen.

  31. Fantastic! What I love about these contests and recent articles, is that they allows the readers to see what Divi can do *beyond* the “box”. With some imagination, creativity and effort, it is possible to take an already great theme/tool and do something unexpected and unique with it, to make it *stand out* in the crowded sea of “modern” websites. These are fabulous examples of that. They may not be everyone’s idea of the perfect website, but I would think the intention is to inspire Divi users to TRY something different.

    • I agree! It’s been so helpful to see creative and innovative uses of Divi in action. I’ve been inspired and challenged by viewing what other Divi users have built. These and other examples have been an invaluable resource for me as a designer. I hope to see more in the future!

  32. Well done all winners, really amazing and inspiring websites!

  33. Doers THE BEST

  34. Congrats to the winners! I have to say though, I don’t understand why Doers is number 1. Without the gif’s it is a simple, boring website with too much white space. The homepage could not be more plain and likely has an excessively high bounce rate. On the other hand, Pensiunea Roua Muntilor is an impressive website! I really appreciate the intentional departure from the the “rows and columns” appearance that is too obvious in most websites, including mine. That website expanded my design boundaries. Nevertheless, congrats to all!

  35. These are wonderful sites. It would be great to hear from the developers how they built these sites, how they used Divi, what other tools they used. The sites are remarkable but overwhelming for an amateur like me who has not much clue about how to achieve the effects that these winning sites show.

    • I agree. I have a bit of a disconnect on how to achieve sites like that with Divi. I could do them from scratch, or in a custom theme, but I have no idea how to do some of those elements with Divi. At least, in a way which will allow for controlling everything on the WP admin.

      • Agree!

    • Great idea!

  36. Really very interesting winners sites.
    Is there a link where I can see the 20 sites that were selected? I’m curious about it

  37. I know this is about ‘design’, but doers.org has a poor load times and Google scores, which is important these days:

    Google – 41/100
    GT Metrix – F (34%)
    Pingdom – 8sec loadtime

  38. Now we need tutorials on how the winners did what they did!

    • That would be very useful and inspiring!

  39. Congrats to the winners !

  40. Well done Doers, much deserved.

  41. Not really sure why “Doers” is #1 Just went to the site and it comes up with no menus and a facebook/twitter link on the left. No idea what to do after getting to the site.

  42. Wow! These sites are inspiring and show the true power and flexibility of Divi. Congrats to the winners!

  43. Really? Is this based on design or conversion rate?

    • This was discussed, fought about and ultimately censored in a previous blog post not too long ago.

      Apparently, very few people here (including ET) want to discuss or even acknowledge anything to do with conversions. Make it look pretty and you’ll get accolades (and apparently now rewards). It doesn’t actually have to make good business sense.

      But what do i know…….

      • Ron,

        Your point is an excellent one. Whether we like it or not, every one of us works in MARKETING. Our job is to create sites that provide a business benefit to our clients. Period.

        No doubt that a visually attractive design is an element of a site’s ability to convert.

        But so is UX; and I’d say that several of the sites, including the winner, could improve in that area.

        Professionally, I never want a site visitor to land on a page where they wonder what they’re supposed to do. If they choose to scroll, then fine. But if they are ready to convert, I always want them to have the chance to do that above the fold.

        There certainly is a huge component of art and visual design in what we do, but it cannot be an end in itself. We need to remember that earning the click is job #1.

      • We didn’t pick these three winners Ron, the community did, and I think they did a great job! You can’t vote on conversion rates without conversion data, but we definitely recommend everyone give Divi Leads a try when building their sites. You never know until you test, and often times testing proves your assumptions wrong.

        • Dear Nick,
          First of all, I don’t have any doubt about your honesty.
          But I think that, to avoid discussions, would be smart expose all the process and the results transparently the next time, like in your Facebook page using the “I like buttom” or using an App with the competitors and their results day by day, visible all the time during the process…
          I can understand that some people have different points of view about the winners
          If all the people is participant of the process then you don’t have no one with doubts… Is just an suggestion. Don’t forget there is money involve in this and most of people is succeptible with this issues.

          • All good ideas Susana but the Divi community voted and ET counted the votes.
            Seems fair to me.

            Truth is we all have our own likes and dislikes so we would never all pick the same top three.

            The trouble with seeing a count on Facebook or the like, is that we would be influenced by the cumulative count… none of us likes to be out of step.

            For my part I’m happy to leave the contest as it is.and simply congratulate the winners. 🙂

    • The community voted for their favorite websites Freddy, so that’s what it was based on.

    • From a UX perspective, I can’t say that any of the nominees impressed me.

      Is there such thing as pretentious web design?

      • I think a significant part of this contest is acknowledging those who have utilized Divi’s capacity to be very customizable and innovative. It’s an inspiration to the rest of us Divi users and an example of what Divi can do when we push ourselves outside of our comfort zones and dare to be bold and original in our design. So I think the focus of the contest was on more than just user experience and conversion rate optimization (though these are vital components of design). I think the focus was primarily on showcasing Divi’s potential and honoring those who have taken advantage of this to use it in a creative and inspiring way. *I’m not trying to undermine the importance of UX and CRO or say that the websites are weak in these areas. Just giving my two cents, for what they’re worth. 🙂

        • Fair enough.

          For me, I’m often left scratching my head when I see websites winning contests purely based on aesthetic.

          I’m sure there are many people who view web design as an art form, but I tend to appreciate websites that offer utility.

          Reading several other comments, it seems that many people don’t even know what these sites are for or what they do – defeating the purpose of a website in my opinion.

          Beauty is important, but not at the cost of function.

          • Good points and important discussion.

            It’s essential to have a results/growth-driven design strategy for sure.

          • Agreed. As a direct response copywriter and marketer, a website that converts prospects to customers is the metric I use to gauge a website’s success.

            I’d rather have the list and the cash than the applause or award.

  44. Wowsers!!!! Such amazing sites and well deserved!!! Congrats to everyone!!!

  45. Many congratulations to the winners. Well done all. And thank you ET for making it possible for all ET members to build great websites with such ease and flexibility.

  46. Pensiunea Roua Muntilor is one of the greatest which I chosed too for my future works, its outstanding in contrast to the more minimalistic designs.

  47. Very inspiring examples! Congratulations to the winners!

  48. Big grats to the winners

  49. Wow, thank you so much everyone. Thank you to everyone that voted for Hyphen, and well done to Doers and Pensiunea Roua Muntilor also! We need to get some cake to celebrate now..

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