Golden Best Of The Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Golden Best Of The Best is and who runs it

Golden Best Of The Best is a readers' choice ballot for Golden, Colorado, organized by Colorado Community Media and classified here as a business best-of program. The name points at the city itself: this is the Golden community's own award ballot, not a statewide or metro-wide list, and the businesses on it serve readers in and around Golden.

Colorado Community Media publishes the program under its own masthead and hosts the voting on Second Street. The ballot address sits on the secondstreetapp.com domain, and the confirmed 2025 ballot reads https://coloradocommunitymedia.secondstreetapp.com/Golden-Best-of-the-Best-2025/. That address is where a supporter lands to vote in the live cycle.

The contest type is an award decided by public vote rather than by a judging panel, which places it alongside the other Colorado readers' choice ballots described in the final section of this guide. What separates it from those neighbours is scope: it belongs to a single city and a single publisher, Colorado Community Media, rather than to a metro region or a mountain resort corridor.

The dated record: editions, window and what is unpublished

Colorado Community Media has run Golden Best Of The Best as an annual program, with confirmed editions in 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. The run is not unbroken: 2019 does not appear in the confirmed years, and the list jumps from 2018 straight to 2020. 2026 is the newest confirmed year, which keeps the annual pattern current through this cycle.

The 2025 voting window ran from March 1 to April 15, and the organizer's own promotion frames that same stretch as the span the ballot uses every year. Under the annual pattern, the next edition lands in 2027, with its exact dates posted on the live ballot when Colorado Community Media opens it.

The organizer has not published the category lineup for Golden Best Of The Best, nor any per-reader voting rule, whether that would be a daily return allowance or an account requirement; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

That gap shapes how a supporter plans. Because no rule text travels with the ballot address, a business that wants to rally its whole customer list, or a reader who wants to know whether returning on several days is permitted, has nothing printed to measure against until the ballot itself opens for the cycle.

How a supporter votes on the Golden ballot today

The mechanic is a public vote: the ballot is open to supporters who reach the Second Street address, and the award goes to the businesses that collect the most support across the ballot's categories. Colorado Community Media hosts the ballot on the platform's standard flow, so the voting experience is the familiar Second Street ballot rather than a custom build.

Backing a Golden business means starting at the confirmed 2025 ballot address, moving through the category pages the ballot presents, selecting the business to back in each category, and submitting. The organizer does not print the category lineup ahead of the window, so the full list appears only on the ballot itself once the cycle opens; the same holds for any instruction about return visits.

Supporters who arrive by search should check the year in the ballot address before voting. The Second Street domain carries a separate ballot for each edition, so an older address can sit alongside the live address, and the year printed in the address is the quickest check a reader has.

No nomination round is described on the organizer's pages for Golden Best Of The Best, and because the ballot is a public vote rather than a judged award, every supporter's selection carries the same weight once it is submitted.

How this ballot sits beside its Colorado neighbours

Colorado carries a crowded field of readers' choice ballots, and Golden Best Of The Best is the entry scoped to Golden rather than to a metro area or a resort corridor. Six neighbours share the same vertical: Top of the Town, Best of Denver under the Westword masthead, Best of NOCO, Best of the Springs, Best of Summit County and Best of the Boat out of Steamboat.

None of those shares this program's publisher, ballot or rules, so a date, a category count or a voting rule taken from any neighbour says nothing about the Golden ballot. The window that applies to Top of the Town does not transfer to Golden Best Of The Best, and a category that appears on the Springs ballot has no bearing on what Colorado Community Media prints for Golden.

What distinguishes the Golden program is the single-city scope under Colorado Community Media: the businesses nominated serve Golden readers, and the voting population is that city's audience rather than a statewide voter base. In practice, a vote cast on a neighbouring ballot does not transfer; backing a Golden business means visiting the Second Street address this page confirms, during the window the organizer states for the cycle.

Strengthening support for a Golden business on this ballot

Support in a public-vote ballot like Golden Best Of The Best comes from reach and timing. A Golden business that asks every customer during the voting stretch, and makes the Second Street ballot address easy to find on receipts, window signs and email footers, gathers far more backing than a business that waits for the result to happen on its own.

Colorado Community Media publishes no rule text covering outside help for this program, so anything a business does should stay inside whatever the live ballot states for the cycle. The votes guide walks through outreach that fits a public-vote mechanic, and the award-votes page explains how purchased support is usually framed for ballots of this kind without promising any outcome.

Timing matters as much as reach. Because the organizer frames the voting stretch as an annual span, a business that prepares its ask before the ballot opens, rather than after, spends the whole window collecting support instead of the tail end of it.