Back in December we challenged the Developer Force community to build exciting Force.com Sites applications in the Force.com Sites Developer Challenge. 348 people from all over the world registered, yielding 32 solid submissions. The challenge was open-ended, which resulted in a wide variety of submissions. Some chose to redo their company website on the Force.com platform, while others tried their hands at implementing travel reservation systems, e-commerce solutions, survey sites, and even a game—British bingo anyone?

Here are the top three submissions:

Best Visual Site:  Check out this submission from Craig Traxler and team from EDL Consulting who built a gaming e-commerce store. This site combines eye-catching Visualforce and CSS, together with effective Ajax updates. All of the the eye-candy sits on top of an e-commerce store.

Best Technical Site:  Timo Fehling and Michael Kahle from H&W Consulting built a fantastic e-commerce site, which really shows off the breadth of the platform. It boasts product recommendations, a shopping cart (handled with cookies), and an authenticated session.

Most Innovative Site:  Rajendra Ogra's wiki is an outstanding example of innovation. Check out the WYSIWIG editor, comments, ratings and more. It's a great start to a full wiki system.

And here are some of the honorable mentions:

Tim Imman submitted a content management system to manage the content on his corporate website.

Stephan Chan developed a recruiting portal that automates some recruitment functions such as testing and survey.

Ritesh Gupta gets an honorable mention for submitting three sites:  an e-commerce site, polling site and the bingo game. 

These outstanding contributions deserve the goodies that are in the mail, but they also serve as a great reminder: Force.com Sites really does open the doors to a host of new use-cases.  Look for some of the submissions on Code Share in the near future as submitters share source code as well as what they've learned in the process of building their site.

Check out this video for a short recap of the program and the top submissions: