Colorado's Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

Three Colorado best-of ballots, one radically thinner public record

coloradosun.com/colorados-best. That's the entire confirmed footprint of Colorado's Best right now, one hub URL on The Colorado Sun's own domain, running annually. Compare that to Denver's other two readers-choice programs and the gap is obvious. 5280 Magazine's Top of the Town has a confirmed July winners event. Westword's Best of Denver is sitting at a confirmed 43rd annual edition. Colorado's Best has neither a stated results date nor an edition count anywhere public.

None of that means the program is smaller or less legitimate. It means The Colorado Sun simply hasn't published the same volume of operational detail its Denver counterparts have, at least not anywhere this guide turned up. A business or organization weighing which of Colorado's readers-choice programs to chase first needs to know that difference before building a campaign timeline around any of them.

No category list, vote cap, or nomination window is published for any of the three. That much they share. What separates Colorado's Best from its two Denver-based counterparts is the total absence of even a results pattern, a fact worth naming honestly rather than filling in with a guess. See the Colorado contest hub for the state's other fan-vote and readers-choice programs.

Why the organizer's identity might matter more than the missing details

The Colorado Sun isn't a Denver alt-weekly or a city lifestyle magazine. It's a statewide nonprofit newsroom, and that distinction shapes a reasonable guess about scope even where the record behind this guide doesn't spell it out directly. Westword's Best of Denver and 5280's Top of the Town both describe themselves, in their own published material, as Denver-metro programs. Nothing published about Colorado's Best makes the same claim, one way or the other.

A statewide newsroom running a Denver-only hub would be the exception, not the rule

That's an inference, not a confirmed fact, and it belongs in this guide precisely because it's the kind of assumption a campaign could get expensive by getting wrong. A restaurant in Grand Junction or a nonprofit in Pueblo reading "Colorado's Best" and assuming it's open to them statewide is making a reasonable bet based on who's running it. Confirming that bet on the live hub before building outreach around it is still the safer move.

Colorado's sport fan-vote programs draw a cleaner line here. Colorado Football Player of the Week and Colorado Football Offensive Player of the Week both run statewide through Sports Illustrated's High School on SI network, covering everything from the smallest 8-man programs to the largest Front Range schools. Colorado's Best doesn't have that kind of explicit scope statement published anywhere checked here, which is exactly the gap worth flagging rather than papering over.

What's confirmed for Colorado's Best, laid out plainly

Two facts. That's the full confirmed record: Colorado's Best runs annually, and it lives at coloradosun.com/colorados-best. Everything past that, category names, a vote cap, whether nomination happens before voting, a specific close date, simply isn't something The Colorado Sun has put on the record. Inventing any of it would read better than this section does. It also wouldn't be true.

A table this short says something on its own: coloradosun.com/colorados-best reads like a younger or more lightly documented hub next to Westword's four-decade run or 5280's established July tradition. That's not a knock on the program. It's a reason to treat the live page, not this guide or any other secondhand summary, as the operative source the moment a cycle actually opens.

One domain, not a spin-off — how the hub itself is built

coloradosun.com/colorados-best sits inside The Colorado Sun's main domain, a path rather than a separate site. That's actually closer to how Westword runs Best of Denver, directly on westword.com, than to 5280's approach, which splits its voting entirely onto 5280scene.com, a domain apart from the magazine's editorial home at 5280.com.

Why that matters practically: a supporter searching "Colorado's Best voting" who lands on The Colorado Sun's general site is already in the right neighborhood, one or two clicks from the hub, unlike a supporter who lands on 5280.com looking for Top of the Town and finds nothing there at all. A single-domain structure lowers the odds of a shared link going stale or pointing at the wrong property.

It doesn't resolve the bigger unknown, though. Whether that hub page branches into category sections, individual nominee pages, or one long combined list is still not something The Colorado Sun has published. For the general mechanics behind any readers-choice push, independent of which specific platform hosts it, award-style vote campaign planning covers ground that applies here as much as it does to Westword's or 5280's ballots.

Building a Colorado's Best campaign around what's actually known

Two confirmed facts and a live hub URL aren't much to build a marketing plan on, and pretending otherwise sets a nominee up to promise something the program itself hasn't stated. The honest starting point: point real supporters at coloradosun.com/colorados-best, and update that link the moment the hub reveals its actual cycle structure.

"Nominated for Colorado's Best" is a defensible claim once a nomination is genuinely live on the hub. "Winner" isn't, not without The Colorado Sun actually publishing a result, in whatever form that turns out to take. Given how little of the mechanic is public, overstating a placement here carries real reputational risk with a readership that expects the same sourcing rigor The Colorado Sun applies to its own reporting.

General campaign mechanics that apply across any online contest vote, not specific to this hub, live at how online contest votes work. Before any budget goes toward a Colorado's Best push, or toward any other Colorado ballot in this same readers-choice family, is buying votes legal answers a question that matters here regardless of whether the hub turns out to run one ballot or fifty.