The 10 Winners of the 1st Romlet Design Awards

From someone eating only cereal for 30 days to a site featuring tree porn, Romlet users span the spectrum of webmasters and bloggers. With over 1,000,000 Romlets served up on user sites, the time has come to announce the winners of the Romlet Awards! Prior to the Romlet beta release the widget only existed on a few select websites. Since then, Romlet ‘blog-boosting’ widgets have spread throughout the blogosphere like a virus. Bloggers and site owners have been using it to gain popularity via backlinks. Each Romlet user has customized their widget to suit their blog – with everything from elegant to bizarre results. The Romlet Awards are designed to highlight the best widget examples as well as the weirdest uses and strangest users.

Sexiest Widget: How can you go wrong when you put a simple white-on-black widget next to such attractive ladies? This is a bit of a spoof award to be sure, but The Bikini Zone seemed worth an honorable mention!

Most Outrageous: Many people blended the design of their Romlet widgets with their site. Other sites, however, such as Cereal Wednesday chose the opposite approach. It is perhaps fitting that the most garishly outstanding yellow Romlet would be found on a site whose author is eating only cereal and milk for 30 days.

Most Pink: Inevitably, someone was going to make a bright pink Romlet. A few sites already have. The Romlet on Daisy the Curly Cat is not only nicely fit to the site’s design and colors, it is extremely extremely pink.

Double-Romlet: With two Romlet widgets to choose from, someone was inevitably bound to use both. NoDirectOn went an extra step and used the maximum widget size for each of their two, then merged the two into one. If that isn’t dedicated fandom what is?

Best Integrated Colors: This Romlet is particularly well-integrated into the color scheme of the site, and put in the same area in relationship to a MyBlogLog widget. It almost seems to be a plugin or built-in site feature on The Life of a School Bus Driver.

Best Integrated Stats: So far the ‘stats’ version of Romlet is somewhat less used than the ‘favicon’ version. However, this site owner and others find the stats-Romlet useful to see not only where visitors are coming from but also how many visitors they are getting. This particular widget fits the colors and overall site theme well.

Best Integrated Widgets: The owner of ShopLikeUs managed to get the MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and Romlet widgets to line up quite nicely and all appear as part of a group. This is one of the tricks to successful widget design: integrating various widgets in a single theme or even area within a theme.

Best Integrated Sidebar: Pure Blogging has taken an extra step in cleanly integrating the Romlet widget into their design. The created a sidebar section and unique ‘referrers’ label to call out Romlet as an element of the site.

Best Foreign Language: Romlet went international quite rapidly, popping up both in European and South American websites within days, and Asian sites shortly after. Webmania has done a great job of cleanly integrating the widget next to their MyBlogLog equivalent.

Most Scandalous Surroundings: The Romlet on this site has dubious company, from almost-naked women to tree porn. So far WallStreetFighter is the most scandalous and off-beat site using the Romlet widget.

Most Prominent Widget: Blogs are often cluttered with widgets all over, but this popular site (which has had over 300,000 widget views!) has its Romlet right in the upper right for all to see. The Web Urbanist widget is also fit well to the sidebar and overall site them.

Best Overall Design: Nothing at Dissassociated seems out of place – least of all the Romlet widget. In fact, the site only has two widgets (Romlet and Flickr) and both are cleanly integrated into the brilliantly simple site layout.

Romlet helps bloggers boast and boost content and brag top referers. More examples of Romlet widgets in action can be found on Romlet’s featured users page. Bloggers and site owners: get your own Romlet widget!