The Ultimate Web Design Gallery Resource

In case you haven’t noticed lately, there a LOT of web design galleries out there. I’d always kept bookmarks for the galleries I’d come across but recently while looking at one I noticed links to a lot of galleries that I hadn’t heard of before. So I thought it might be worthwhile to investigate just how many there were out there. I came across a few blog posts with links to galleries but rather than just adding to the list and then publishing it, I thought I’d do a bit more investigation and analysis.

What I’ve come up with is a table of 352 web design galleries from around the world and in a variety of languages.

For each gallery I’ve noted various pieces of information. Rather than make subjective judgments about the galleries’ quality or style, the information covers:

• how old the gallery is and whether it’s currently active or not (more than a quarter seem to have gone by the wayside already)
• what language it’s in and what country it’s located in
• how many sites are listed
• subscribers by Feedburner (if available)
• Google PageRank
• Alexa traffic ranking
• the creator/owner of the gallery (if it was displayed on the gallery itself)
• which CMS or blogging platform is used to power the site
• if it was using Wordpress (which was quite common), if it was using a particular theme
• whether the site was running ads or not

and has been set up so that it can be sorted which means that there are several criteria for assessing the galleries which different galleries coming out on top depending on which column you choose to sort on.

Analysis of the statistics

Based on the information in the table, the following interesting statistics can be drawn:

• There is a total of 352 CSS galleries. If anyone knows of any others that they think should be on the list, please leave a comment.
• The most number of sites listed is 87,639 by HostPattern.
• The average number of sites listed per each gallery is 1,575 with the average number of sites listed per month being 55.
• The most prolific gallery (i.e., the highest average of sites listed per month) is also HostPattern (3,958 sites per month since 2008-03-28)
• The sites with the highest Google Pagerank of 7 are CSS Vault, CSS Zen Garden.
• CSS Mania has the highest Alexa ranking (7,301).
• CSS Remix has the most subscribers by Feedburner (23,525).
• The oldest gallery is Styleboost established 1st January 2001
• The newest gallery is Drawar established 10th November 2009
• The table below shows the number of web design galleries created each year, and shows a marked increase in the last couple of years:
  

  Number of web design galleries created each year

  2001	3
  2002	2
  2003	2
  2004	14
  2005	12
  2006	51
  2007	84
  2008	102
  2009	82

• The most most popular CMS is Wordpress which powers 195 sites (nearly half).
• The number of sites using a specialised Wordpress gallery theme is 13 (as far as I can tell).
• The most popular Wordpress themes come from OS Designer (used on 12 sites).
• The busiest creator of web design galleries is Suffolk Software based in the US which is responsible for 8 sites (not all of them still active).

• There are 15 languages represented:

  Language	Number of sites
  English	314
  French	6
  Czech	5
  German	5
  Chinese	4
  Croatian	3
  Russian	3
  Japanese	2
  Dutch	2
  Portuguese	2
  Turkish	2
  Spanish	1
  Lithuanian	1
  Romanian	1
  Slovakian	1

• And 48 countries represented:

  Country	Number of sites
  United States of America	128
  United Kingdom	31
  Germany	15
  Romania	14
  France	12
  Netherlands	12
  Australia	11
  India	9
  Italy	9
  China	8
  Czech Republic	8
  Turkey	7
  Bangladesh	6
  Canada	6
  Japan	6
  Bulgaria	5
  Poland	5
  Denmark	4
  Spain	4
  Republic of Ireland	4
  Phillipines	4
  Pakistan	4
  Slovakia	4
  Brazil	3
  Switzerland	3
  Croatia	3
  Russia	3
  Austia	2
  Belgium	2
  Lithuania	2
  Argentina	1
  Croatia & Montenegro	1
  Cyprus	1
  Dominican Republic	1
  Finland	1
  Greece	1
  Iceland	1
  Latvia	1
  Macedonia	1
  Mexico	1
  Norway	1
  Serbia	1
  Singapore	1
  Thailand	1
  Ukraine	1
  Uruguay	1
  Vietnam	1
  South Africa	1

• The percentage of galleries with ads is 81.53.
• There was a large number of galleries which appear to be inactive – 17.05% – although some had notices saying they were due to be relaunched.

Notes about the information gathered

My aim before creating this table of galleries was that the information be kept up-to-date as much as possible. To accomplish this without taking up too much of my time in the future, I’ve put together a number of scripts to automate the updating of the numerical columns of information. There are scripts that are run automatically on a regular basis for the Google PageRank, Alexa traffic ranking, subscribers by Feedburner and for the number of sites listed. If there are any inaccuracies in whether a site is active or not, its age, location, what CMS it is powered by and whether it uses a particular gallery theme or not, I’ll have to update those myself.

Disclaimers

While I have endeavoured that the information contained in the table of web design galleries be as accurate as possible, there were occasions when certain pieces of information weren’t immediately apparent from the gallery in question so I had to either use alternative sources of information or make guesses.

• Galleries were listed as inactive if there were no new sites listed in the last couple of months. There may be galleries on the list going through a temporary lull that are still active and there may also be sites I’ve listed as active that actually aren’t anymore.
• To determine the location of a gallery, I either used information from the site itself or did a quick Whois search. For a lot of domains registered with registrars like Godaddy and Dreamhost, that sort of informtion is not readily available via a Whois search so in those cases I simply listed the location as the US – there may well be sites from other locations using those US-based registration services however.
• The number of sites listed on each gallery is updated by a script that reads each gallery’s feed on a weekly basis. To determine the starting figure was not always staightforward; some galleries displayed prominently how many sites they listed, while for others I had to make some manual calculations. Because of this, there’s a chance that the figures won’t be entirely accurate. There are also some galleries which have no feed so their number of sites listed won’t be updated.
• As with the galleries’ location, if the galleries’ archives weren’t listed by month or their individual entries weren’t dated, I had to use a Whois or domain age lookup to determine how long the site had been in existence which means in some cases the start date may be inaccurate.
• The number of subscribers by Feedburner is not only limited to those galleries who use Feedburner to server their feeds, but also to those that have enabled the FeedCount setting.
• Identifying galleries powered by Wordpress was a straightforward process, at least for me as I’m quite familiar with Wordpress and know what to look for, but there’s a high likelihood that a number of the galleries that don’t have anything listed in that column are actually powered by a CMS that I’m not familiar with.
• As far as I’m aware, there are two main themes made available for Wordpress that are specifically designed for running web design galleries – created by WP Designer and OS Designer. It’s possible that there are others I’ve missed and also that I didn’t pick up on the fact that a gallery was using one of these themes when reviewing it.

If you find any inaccuracies in the information contained in the table that you believe should be corrected, please let me know by making a comment and I’ll endeavour to make the changes.

Acknowledgements

Credit must go to Frequency Decoder for the Unobtrusive Table Sort Script, Peter Krantz and Eric Meyer for their work on creating accessible HTML/CSS bar charts, Matt Huggins for the Alexa traffic script, Eston Bond for the Feedburner subscribers script, HM2K for the Google Pagerank script and Yari McGauley for some troubleshooting advice.

While I was aware of several web design gallery lists on other blogs (I actually found some galleries I wasn’t aware of for my list during my research), there were a couple that I didn’t discover until I had nearly finished compiling my table that use a format somewhat similar to my own: Caroline Middlebrook and CSS Tricks, just to make it clear that I didn’t set up to rip off anyone else’s idea. Hopefully the added information I’ve compiled in conjunction with the ongoing updating will make my contribution to this topic worthwhile.

This is a first post on the subject of web design galleries. In a second part, I hope to ask some owners of galleries about their experiences running a gallery and get some opinions from SEOs about the current trend which has seen so many galleries emerge.