The Most Outstanding Templates from ThemeForest

The Most Incredibly Outstanding Site Templates

Mar 1st in Web Roundups by Jeffrey Way

From January 1-31, ThemeForest hosted a fierce site template competition. Our authors competed against one another to win $300 - as well as some helpful promotion.

After much thought and deliberation, the winners were selected early in February! Trust me when I say that this wasn't an easy task - by any means! So without further ado, here are the best ten site templates from our "$3000 New Year Competition", in no particular order. I hope more of you will consider entering our upcoming ThemeForest competitions. Be sure to check the site regularly, as we host a new one each month!

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Author: Jeffrey Way

Hi, I'm Jeff. I'm the editor of Nettuts+, and the Site Manager of Theme Forest. I spend too much time in front of the computer and find myself telling my fiance', "We'll go in 5 minutes!" far too often. I just can't go out to dinner while I'm still producing FireBug errors...drives me crazy. During my free time, I sporadically write articles for my own personal blog. If it will keep you in the good graces of the church, follow us on Twitter.

  • Live Performance Premium Template

    Live Performance

    "We built the Live Performance Template based on the 960 Grid System (http://www.960.gs) to suit those in need of a website template for their band, group, comedy tour, venue, or anything requiring a schedule, really."

    View Theme

  • Great Portfolio

    Great Portfolio

    "Great Portfolio is a one page portfolio and a very clean template. It has 2 color options to choose from namely, dark blue, and dark brown. It also has a smooth scroller to each menu of the page. Contact Form is functional and ready to use."

    View Theme

  • Portfolium

    Portfolium

    "Portfolium is aimed at creative professionals including but not only : graphic and web designers, photographers, developers and artists of any kind. It puts accent on your work and features a nice jquery slider on the homepage."

    View Theme

  • Coffee

    Coffee

    "This theme is a fixed layout based on 960px grid. It uses no tables for layout. The main page has three columns whereas sub pages have the left-most columns merged."

    View Theme

  • Business Portfolio 960

    Business Portfolio 960

    "I built this Business Portfolio template based on the 960 Grid System. It’s one of the few templates on ThemeForest that are based on this system and it’s just one of the many things that makes it unique."

    View Theme

  • Ultimate Animated Portfolio

    ULTIMATE ANIMATED PORTFOLIO

    "This is a complete, fully featured, animated portfolio template that includes two skins, a dark one (black/blue/orange) and a bright one (white, gray, blue)."

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  • Core 3

    Core3

    "The Core 3 template is very simple, clean and effective. It is incredibly easy to modify and can easily be used for business or personal. Theme coding is very well commented and easy to read."

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  • Business | Portfolio + Blog

    Business | Portfolio + Blog

    "A stylish design ideal for a web dev company or a business. The design can be modified to work with other types of websites, such as a blog. And you don’t need to worry about fonts! This design uses only one font, I bet you’ve heard about Lucida. I’m draw this illustration (apples)."

    View Theme

  • Silver Spoon

    Silver Spoon

    "This is a modern template which uses a lot of jQuery and CSS to create great user experience."

    View Theme

  • Nothern Lights

    Nothern Lights

    "An amazing colorful and very functional site template that can be used for general business or a sweet portfolio."

    View Theme

And there you have it! We considered many factors when making our choices.

  • Practicality: How "real world" is it?
  • Uniqueness: Does this template stand out among the others?
  • Sales: How many sales has this template made, per day?
  • Construction: Does the template validate and follow best practices?
  • Options: Did the author supply different CSS "themes" for each template? Has extra value been added?

Please join me in once again congratulating the winning authors. Stay tuned for more upcoming ThemeForest competitions!


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User Comments

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  1. PG

    Mark March 1st

    Good selection

    ( Reply )
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    BroOf March 1st

    yea, some cool design!

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    Erik Bernskiold March 1st

    Definitely quality designs! Nice enough to share it with us all.

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    Ilyas March 1st

    Nice ones. Designs are cool but they are less in number, so hope to see more of them

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    Tom March 1st

    very nice themes there

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    marcus neto March 1st

    My favorite is business template 960. Love the sliders. Thinking about a new photography website that I need to make. That template would save me hours….

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      Justin Scheetz March 4th

      Thanks, glad you like it! (it’s mine) :)

      ( Reply )
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    Juarez P. A. Filho March 1st

    I already tried all of them at ThemeForest.net and they are so good. :)

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    Jan Paul March 1st

    Some very good designs there

    ( Reply )
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    Mike Smith March 1st

    Awesome designs. Definitely worth winning a competition like this.

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    Derek March 1st

    Can’t say I’m a fan of any of these. They’re all far from unique, that’s for sure.

    And why the hell is the last one titled “nOthern lights”?!?

    ( Reply )
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    Nicholas March 1st

    Can’t wait to do quality stuff like this, thank you for sharing.

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    N_Lite March 1st

    So! Great Templates. All Have a good design!

    ( Reply )
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    Nate March 1st

    Wow, true excellence.

    ( Reply )
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    Michael March 1st

    Great Portfolio looks like it came from William Smith’s portfolio. Looks the same except a few tweaks.

    http://www.authenticstyle.co.uk/

    ( Reply )
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    Dave March 1st

    Excellent templates, indeed!

    I’m guessing that all the nominating people are male… why? A strong preference for darker colors. Just a guess. :)

    ( Reply )
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    Andy Gongea March 1st

    I only like the second one. It is simple and it has style.

    ( Reply )
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    Moksha Solutions March 1st

    nice list

    ( Reply )
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    Bjorn March 1st

    A lot of 960 love out there. Nice post!

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    Dan March 1st

    They’re all nice but so… similar. Bums me out.

    ( Reply )
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    Taylor Satula March 1st

    Great Portfolio seems nice

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    Zarathustra March 2nd

    Yep. They’re templates ;)

    ( Reply )
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    Dan March 2nd

    Off topic, but I’m getting really tired of words like “incredible”, “outstanding”, “fabulous”, “mind-blowing”, “insane”… you get the point. It makes me feel, “like”, 13 again. Does anyone else feel the same?

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    gazza j March 2nd

    very nice templates. i think coffee is my favourite does anyone know if they are free or do i have to pay?

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    Anna marie March 2nd

    Hi..
    Definitely good designs, thanks for sharing with us.Very eager to see the new list.
    Thanks..
    Anna

    ( Reply )
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    Creamy CSS March 2nd

    Hmm.. Some of them are really nice, but not all.

    ( Reply )
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    KaZ March 2nd

    Meh.

    ( Reply )
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    Zehy March 2nd

    Eh, some of them seem nice, but they aren’t really appealing.

    ( Reply )
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    Meshach March 2nd

    $15 max for a theme??

    Envato rips people off with ThemeForest

    ( Reply )
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    Ryan March 2nd

    Great designs.

    ( Reply )
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    William March 2nd

    I like “Core.” The others didn’t do much for me.

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    Greg Wallace March 2nd

    Some good ones for sure. Feeling the Business 960.

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    Chris Barnett March 2nd

    Awesome collection!

    ( Reply )
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    John Mesh March 2nd

    It’s really cool collection!

    ( Reply )
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    Danny March 2nd

    Some are pretty nice. Sure they are helpful to some people.

    But I wonder why a web designer would purchase a template to demonstrate their OWN abilities in web design? Does that make sense to anyone? Because it sure doesn’t to me.

    I know the template could be used for other types of portfolios, but it definitely seems to be focused on web designers.

    ( Reply )
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    Martyn March 3rd

    Some nice templates, I like the Silver spoon and Northern Lights the best I think

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    A_Flama March 3rd

    Nice themes :)

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    Dario Gutierrez March 3rd

    Cool dude!!

    ( Reply )
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    Deven March 4th

    Nice Collection

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    Coffee Talkee March 5th

    I like the Coffee template. Thanks for sharing these.

    ( Reply )
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    Byila March 9th

    hımm!.. Nice Collection

    ( Reply )
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    Jamie Buchanan March 31st

    I love all the Envato sites and all the great content – I think that post title just crossed a line though. Anyone else feel a backlash against over sensationalism?

    ( Reply )
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