Top of the Town: How Voting Works & How to Win

5280scene.com, not 5280.com, and a July bash instead of a leaderboard

5280scene.com. Not 5280.com, the magazine's main site, and not a page buried three clicks deep. Top of the Town, 5280 Magazine's annual Denver readers-choice program, runs its public vote on that separate address, and a campaign that points supporters at the wrong URL sends them nowhere useful.

The confirmed facts are short. 5280 Magazine runs the program every year. Denver's consumer business categories, the full range a city magazine typically covers, make up the ballot. Winners get their moment at an in-person event each July, not a rolling online leaderboard. That's the record.

A specific category list, a vote cap, and an exact nomination-to-close calendar are three things 5280 Magazine hasn't put on the record anywhere public. Rather than guess, treat 5280scene.com as the only source once a cycle actually opens. For the rest of Colorado's readers-choice and fan-vote programs, the Colorado contest hub lists what else runs statewide.

What Top of the Town shares with 5280's other lists, and what it doesn't

5280 isn't a one-list magazine. Denver's Top of the Town sits alongside 5280 Top Doctors and 5280 Top Lawyers, two other annual programs the same publisher runs under the 5280.com domain rather than 5280scene.com. Confusing the three costs a business real time.

Why the mechanic, not just the name, matters

Top Doctors and Top Lawyers lean on peer nomination inside a profession, physicians voting on physicians, attorneys on attorneys. Top of the Town is the opposite: a general public vote open to anyone with a browser. A restaurant or boutique chasing recognition needs the reader-facing program, not the professional list a doctor's office down the street might turn up in instead.

Colorado Springs runs a close cousin of this format too: a Top of Town program from Colorado Springs Magazine rather than 5280, covering a different city under a different publisher entirely. Two "Top of Town" names, two unrelated organizations, and a business operating in both cities needs two separate campaigns, not one shared link.

The vote lives at 5280scene.com; make sure a shared link lands there

5280scene.com. That's the whole address a supporter needs, and it's worth writing exactly that way in a text or a social post, because "vote for us on 5280" reads as vague to someone standing in line at a coffee shop with fifteen seconds of attention to spare.

Once a business's actual voting page goes live inside a given year's ballot, grab that specific link and use it everywhere: email signatures, receipt footers, a table tent by the register. A homepage link forces a supporter to search for the right category and business name alone, and some people will simply give up.

General campaign mechanics that apply to any readers-choice push, not specific to 5280, live at how online contest votes work. Businesses running an award-style campaign specifically, gathering the steady, category-by-category support Top of the Town depends on, may find award-vote campaign planning useful for pacing reminders around a launch like this one.

Denver's scale is nothing like a resort-town ballot

Denver isn't Juneau. It isn't Steamboat Springs or Summit County either. The metro spans neighborhoods with distinct identities, RiNo, LoDo, Cherry Creek, the Highlands, Five Points, Capitol Hill, Washington Park, and a Top of the Town nominee in any one of them competes on the same citywide ballot as businesses from every other.

That's a real contrast with two of Colorado's other readers-choice programs. Best of Summit County covers a compact string of I-70 resort towns where one group text can reach a meaningful slice of the voting population. Best of the Boat in Steamboat Springs works at an even smaller scale. Denver's consumer-category ballot draws from a metro area with well over a million more residents than either of those markets combined.

A restaurant, bar, or bakery weighing a food-and-drink category push should plan for that scale difference from the outset. Reaching real, repeat customers across a market this size takes a longer runway than a resort-town campaign does; see restaurant vote campaign planning for pacing built around a citywide ballot rather than a single Main Street.

Calling a July win before 5280 actually says so

July. That's when 5280 puts a name on Top of the Town, at an in-person event rather than a live-updating scoreboard a business could refresh all spring. Before that date, "nominated" is the honest word. "Winner" isn't, not yet.

Precision protects a business more than enthusiasm does. "Top of the Town 2026, [category]" cites something checkable once 5280 actually publishes it. A bare "Denver's best" claim with no year or category attached doesn't, and it risks overstating something the magazine never said in that form.

A vote-promotion service can put a business's real customers in front of the correct 5280scene.com page on the right schedule. It can't guarantee where a category lands once every other nominee's supporters show up too. Before any readers-choice campaign gets a budget, Top of the Town included, is buying votes legal is worth reading first.