What it’s like to run a web design gallery
Having compiled the list, done the numbers and dealt with the facts, I thought for the follow-up article to the The Ultimate Web Design Gallery Resource that I’d get some opinions from not only some of the people who run the web design galleries in the list about what it’s like to run one of these sites, but also some search engine optimisation (SEO) professionals about the perceived value of having your site included on one (or many).
So I contacted a few gallery owners at random – Shabu Anower of Best CSS Gallery, Mike Archibald of CSS Yorkshire, Mike Cherim of Accessites, Ryan Detzel of InspirationFolder and Deron Sizemore of NiceStylesheet – and put the following questions to them:
- What’s the best thing about running a web design gallery?
- And the worst?
- Has it met the goals you set at the beginning so far? If not, why?
- Do you have different goals for it in the future?
- How much time do you spend on it?
- Do you think there’s room for any more web design galleries or is the market too saturated already? If there is room, what should people be doing differently that’s not being done already?
Web design gallery owners respond
1. What’s the best thing about running a web design gallery?
Shabu Anower
Gaining a good experience of web design trends. Design galleries are more attractive than text links, viewers also can get a glimpse of the site without going to the site etc.
Mike Archibald
I get to see hundreds of websites good and bad, so it keeps me up-to-date with what people are making. Plus, you get to play God! Only kidding, I also try to promote web standards and good design.
Mike Cherim
In the case of Accessites, it’s satisfying to communicate to others that web accessibility doesn’t have to be some undesirable offshoot of mainstream development. Accessibility is sometimes viewed as the proverbial red-headed stepchild. That really needs to change. We are helping make that so.
Ryan Detzel
The best thing about InspirationFolder has to be the great designs themselves. I’m amazed everyday when I check over recently submitted designs and see the great works of art that people produce, it’s not only inspirational to see the great work but believe it or not it’s one of the high points in my day.
Deron Sizemore
I no longer have to search the other galleries for inspiration. I get it delivered right to my inbox on a daily basis.
2. What’s the worst about running a web design gallery?
Shabu Anower
It can lead to a tendency for designers to copy others’ work.
Mike Archibald
The time it takes.
Mike Cherim
Oh, the plain old roll-up-your-sleeves work at times. The team at Accessites is pretty stable keeping typical management woes to a minimum. And due to the team, the plain old roll-up-your-sleeves work is well-shared and not overly burdensome. In other words, the ‘worst’ is pretty damn attractive in our case.
Ryan Detzel
It can be time consuming to go over, screen shot, verify, insert the new sites but it’s worth it in the long run.
Deron Sizemore
Having to choose what designs make it into the gallery and what ones don’t. I really want to include every design submitted into the gallery, but it’s just not feasible with the amount of submissions that I receive.
3. Has it met the goals you set at the beginning so far? If not, why?
Shabu Anower
Most of the time it can achieve the goals for the beginner. Because it gives different types of ideas to the new designer.
Mike Archibald
Yes, CSS Yorkshire has proved very popular and I think more and more designers are dropping tables and adopting web standards.
Mike Cherim
There is no end-zone. The goal in the case of Accessites is a verb. The goals are not met, it’s all in the doing. Education will always be needed. All we can hope to do is to affect a small but consistent change on the web. A ripple of conversion. And to that end we have been successful to a degree: We’ve had lots of people provide feedback communicating their thanks for the inspiration we’ve given them. That feels good.
Ryan Detzel
Absolutely. When I started the site I had a few main goals in mind. First, I wanted an easy way to store the designs in virtual folders so I could easily recall the designs later when I needed some inspiration. I think I achieved this pretty well. Second, I wanted to be able to search by colour. All too often when I start a project I have a colour scheme in mind so I wanted the ability to see what people have done with similar colours and what other colours people are using along side certain colours. The colour part was a bit tricky but once I figured it out I’m really glad I included it. Lastly I wanted a large collection. I wanted to be able to just visit one gallery and not have to bookmark and visit 10+ galleries every time I wanted some inspiration. I set my goal high, 20,000 sites and that was reached rather quickly. My next goal is 50,000 sites and I hope to reach that by the end of this year.
Deron Sizemore
To be honest, I never really had any goals when I developed the site. Ever since I first started with CSS I knew I wanted to create a gallery as a fun little project. At that time (this was a few years ago), I didn’t have a means to create it as I only knew HTML and CSS. Thank God for Expression Engine, it’s made my life so much easier with taking my ideas from simply being a domain name to full blown sites.
4. Do you have different goals for it in the future?
Shabu Anower
All the web design galleries are following almost the same boring idea. But they need to overcome it. At one time only a picture of the site and its title was enough to show. But to get popularity now it needs different ideas. For example, for each site you can provide information as to how the site was developed or who developed it and on which basis the site is built (Wordpress, Joomla, Flash, manual, PHP etc.). This will be much more helpful for the designer.
Mike Archibald
Just to grow the site’s popularity and keep promoting web standards.
Mike Cherim
Not really, since the goals we have are on-going. We are in the let’s press on mode.
Ryan Detzel
Tons. Everyday when I login and I’m browsing around the site I think of new ideas… like the recently launched Dashboard widget that lets me browse my inspiration folders right from my desktop. Some things in the workshop include the ability for designers to claim and comment on their designs, a tagging system and probably some more cool and useful color tools.
Deron Sizemore
Yes. I’ve actually had some ideas for it for a while now but with my blog and development of another site, I’ve not had the time to implement my ideas. A couple of the ideas are nothing out of the ordinary and what you would expect on a sites of this nature. I do have one idea though that will hopefully differentiate NiceStylesheet from the rest of the galleries out there. I just have to make the time to implement these changes.
5. How much time do you spend on it?
Shabu Anower
If you are already an owner of a web gallery you need to give a lot of time to your site, because a lot of users are dependent on you. So take the time to carefully assess the sites to add to your gallery.
Mike Archibald
Approx 30 minutes per day. Don’t even want to think about time spent on design and development!
Mike Cherim
Thanks to Accessites being a team effort, the time investment isn’t bad. The actual graders rotate, taking turns as the lead grader (doing 90% of the work in that position). When not in rotation, the investment is only an hour or two every other week. The lead grader slot, which comes up about every two months or so, does require a good six to eight hour expenditure. That can be hard what with lives of our own and being volunteers and al that, but since the over all workload is shared, we feel it’s worth it.
Ryan Detzel
Not counting gathering and sorting new sites, 3-4 hours a week. Counting gather and sorting, 8+ hours a week. This is a project and not a job it takes a back seat to paying work.
Deron Sizemore
Not much right now. I only update the site once per week every Monday evening. It takes me around 30 minutes to go through the designs in the queue, create the thumbnails and upload them to the site. Once I implement the new features, it will take up more of my time each week, but I think it will be worth it.
6. Do you think there’s room for any more web design galleries or is the market too saturated already? If there is room, what should people be doing differently that’s not being done already?
Shabu Anower
Though it is hard to say, I think there is no scope or hope for any more web design galleries in this market. Only the existing galleries can become more popular by adding different types of feature. But if you’re a beginner with your own idea for a web gallery, the chance of succeeding will be a lottery. Because people aren’t interested anymore in subscribing to new galleries’ feeds or in submitting their sites to new galleries, even though your new gallery might have different helpful ideas and content.
Mike Archibald
There are a lot of galleries out there I know. I’ve seen lots come and go in the two and a half years CSS Yorkshire has been going. It’s a free country if someone wants to make, one why not?
Mike Cherim
I think a plain-Jane CSS gallery might struggle because, as you say, the market is saturated. But those who can align a solid team with good management, are prepared to really work at and give something of value along the way, and can find an interesting niche that has a following, should succeed. I think galleries just need to have a twist nowadays. The number one complaint I’ve heard is that many galleries is just show thumbnails of sites without explaining why the sites are being featured. People love pretty sites, but a successful gallery will probably be the one that goes above and beyond that particular minimum value/effort baseline.
Ryan Detzel
As with anything there is always room; you just have to play your cards right. I think niche galleries are starting to become more popular – galleries that cater to certain designs like Wordpress themes or ‘dark’ color schemes. There are some great galleries out there but from the ones I visit they haven’t adapted very well or added anything new (other than sites) which makes them lose their appeal. If I had to give advice to someone thinking of starting a gallery I would tell them to pick a niche and keep it updated not only with new sites but also new features.
Deron Sizemore
I think the market is definitely too saturated. To be honest, it was probably too saturated when I launched this past October, but I owned the domain for a couple years and it’s a site that I always wanted to do, so I went for it. I suppose there is always room for others to enter the market, but they’ll really need to do something different to set themselves apart from the rest to succeed. Luckily my blog traffic has picked up over the last few months and I’ve been able to promote NiceStylesheet through it which I think has helped get the name out there.
Besides running Best CSS Gallery, Shabu is also the designer of one of the two most popular Wordpress themes for galleries, the OS Designer Theme. I asked him how many people have downloaded his theme and how many sites he thought were actually using it (I identified four).
Shabu Anower
Downloads so far stand at 6424, with more than 100 sites in many different niches using it. Typical usages include as design showcases, mySpace design gallery, Social network galleries, WP theme galleries, domain portfolios, showcase of network sites and a few others that I can’t remember now. You can get a good idea of usage by searching for “Wordpress Themes by OS Designer”. There are 38,500 results :p
SEOs respond
I also asked SEOs Paul Forest of 1st Place Design and Jason West of Web Salad for their views on the popularity of these types of web design galleries.
Most galleries focus on CSS-only design and both identified clear SEO benefits derived from creating websites with CSS instead of tables.
Paul Forest
CSS is becoming more popular as it is easier to manage long term. It also loads faster, which is something that will be rewarded by Google.
Jason West
From an SEO perspective, tableless code is much better. By removing as much code as possible from a web page you are making a search engine spider’s job a lot easier to find
the content and ‘theme’ the page. An analogy I use is making the SEs swim through mud vs clear water. The more messy code, tables, the easier it is for the SE spider to trip up and leave the page.
I asked if there was any sort of SEO benefit to be gained from submitting a site for inclusion in these galleries, and also if there was any potential detrimental
SEO effects.
Paul Forest
I can see a good benefit if your site is CSS related and don’t really see any detrimental effects if you have a legitimate connection.
Jason West
The benefits are links, links and more links. There can be detrimental effects if the galleries are sitting in what have been identified as ‘bad neighbourhoods’ by the SEs. This occurs if the purpose of the gallery is simply to add spammy content, milk Adsense etc.
As with the gallery owners, I also asked if there was room for any more galleries
Paul Forest
I think there is scope for other types of galleries. The main concern as a whole is that there is potential for spamming search engines. I think if this were to happen, it will probably be easily identifiable to Google.
Jason West
I don’t think the market is oversaturated. However, for a starter I think it is improtant to realise that success at social media requires as much ‘give’ as ‘take’. By this I mean that proactive contributing to other galleries, via blog comments etc, is just as important as what you have to dsay on your own gallery. Your own gallery is also a great testing ground for new ideas.
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11 responses to What it’s like to run a web design gallery. Add your own.
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939 graphic and web design | May 30th, 2008 at 7:27 am [...]John Faulds from Tyssen Design has written an article which includes the views of 4 web gallery owners.[...]
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2CSS Design Yorkshire: What's it like to run a web design gallery? | May 30th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
[...] John Faulds from Tyssen Design has written an article which includes the views of 4 web gallery owners. Mike Archibald from 939 Design who runs CSS [...]
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Thanks John. It was interesting to read what the others wrote.
Thanks John, a great article. Good to compare other people’s views.
Yes, definitely agree with Mike and Mike above. Great read. Very interesting to see why some other gallery owners started and what they expect for the future.
Thanks for the opportunity John. I’ll be posting about this on my blog this weekend.
This is a great overview of what it takes to run a gallery. I would agree with all that they said, and it’s nice to see that others have similar experiences to what I’ve found.