Show me your site…

Posted by Andrew Faulkner on October 10th, 2005.

Andrew Faulkner is the admin at fadtastic. Andrew prides himself on standards-based, accessible web design in the city of Nottingham, UK. He believes in aesthetically pleasing accessible design and that 'standards compliant does not equal boring.'

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Website Showcases. It seems every man and his dog has one these days.

I spend a lot of time browsing them and I’ve recently struggled to keep up with the volume of new showcases appearing. For your benefit, here’s a list of the website showcases I know of - ‘Add to bookmarks’ at the ready!

Showcases :

http://www.cssbeauty.com/ - “CSS design showcase”
http://www.cssimport.com/ - “The no frills inspirational site”
http://cssvault.com/ - “inspiring creativity”
http://www.nv30.com/mt/blogomania/index.php (CSS Mania)
http://www.devilsdetails.com/ - “The devil is in the details”
http://www.stylegala.com/ - “A publication about web design and standards”
http://www.unmatchedstyle.com/
http://w3csites.com/ - “xxxx Sites, xxx Designers, 1 Goal”
http://www.webstandardsawards.com/ - Form and function. Combined”
http://screenspire.com/ - “The leading full()screen inspiration”
http://designshack.co.uk/
http://meryl.net/css/index.php - “CSS Collection”
http://www.cssdrive.com/

“Personal Website Collections” :

http://www.andybudd.com/links/well_designed_css_sites/index.php - Andy Budd
http://thesis.veracon.net/ - “Sites, that’s all.”
http://nn.veracon.net/ (Nearly Nice)
http://smoothoperator.strund.jp/

One to watch in the future is: http://cssrules.com/

Phew. I’m sure there are more but it’s hard to remember them all. (Please shout if I’ve missed some.)

I know Collylogic discussed the history, merits and flaws of each showcase so I won’t repeat his thinking unnecessarily. The point of the post was basically to cover the current showcases and ask you the following:

Why do you visit showcases?

Where will showcases go next?

Are there too many showcases?

How would you make showcases different? (layout/usability/interactivity/content)

Which one is your favourite? (And why!)

Join the debate - get commenting!

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( 20 so far )

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# Why do you visit showcases?
Inform me about last techniques and inspiration.

# Where will showcases go next?
??

# Are there too many showcases?
No. But maybe too many with the same criterias.

# How would you make showcases different? (layout/usability/interactivity/content)
improve it with public bookmarks, offer to everyone to make their own selection of beautiful css websites.

# Which one is your favourite? (And why!)
don’t have a favorite…

marie
October 10th, 2005
#

Where will showcases go next?

I meant “how will they change in the near future?”

Hope that’s cleared up.

Andrew Faulkner
October 10th, 2005
#

I love checking out these pages for inspiration. However the real purpose of a lot of these css pages seems to be traffic generating.

Check out the amount of Google ads on a css news/showcase site next time you visit one.

*I still love these pages btw.

Andrew
October 10th, 2005
#

I don’t know if there are too many showcase sites but so many of them showcase the same sites. I’m not saying that the featured sites don’t deserve to be there but the showcase sites themselves need to do something different from one another.

I’m a big fan of W3Csites.com. While they do feature showcased sites any designer, no matter how good or bad, can be on display for a month. There are a lot of really great designs that never see a showcase.

Dan
October 10th, 2005
#

I initially started css thesis to make it a directory of sites I like. However, due to an overwhelmingly popular start, I was ‘forced’ to being accepting submissions. This actually made it all a bit harder, probably because I had to read through a load of submissions everyday - not just being able to feature a site I saw. Because more traffic means people want more - more quality. This is why I started nearly nice - where I don’t care if the sites are unsemantic (as long as they’re not overloaded with tables - contradictory, I know), and I don’t care if people look. It’s still nice for myself to be able to look there and say ‘wow, those ARE some nice sites!’ So while it’s not intended to be a popular site, it can store bookmarks that are only nice designs - and believe it or not, it’s faster to add a site to there than it is to bookmark one (due to some javascript magic).
So, with my totally biased mind, here are my answers:

# Why do you visit showcases?
Because they’re fantastic inspiration.
# Where will showcases go next?
That’s a hard question. I’m feeling that many showcases will extend to more than they currently are. (Yes, I have plans for css thesis.)
# Are there too many showcases?
In fact, I don’t think there is. While there very often are duplicates of entries on one site and another, there usually pops something unique up - and I believe that no showcase would be as big if the others hadn’t been there - precisely because showcases DO ’steal’ from each other.
# How would you make showcases different? (layout/usability/interactivity/content)
Not really sure - maybe have more democracy as in ‘people have to elect a site as beautiful’ before it’s entered (opens Emacs and notes down). I don’t know.
# Which one is your favourite? (And why!)
The ones I visit daily are Stylegala, CSS Vault, CSS Beauty, Screenspire and CSS Import. My favourite is probably Stylegala in that it doesn’t just have a gallery. I just love looking through those public ‘news’.

Veracon
October 10th, 2005
#

I have mixed feelings on this subject; -everyday i look at a lot of these “showcases” and the featured websites.. sometimes getting really inspired by it
-but everyday i see more of the same!
Although some trends are pretty, a lot of the designers seem to be nothing more than fashion-victims! (sometimes me included)

Its almost like a contest for the most featured site.

Pascal
October 10th, 2005
#

Originally, when I was first learning CSS, I would visit showcase sites to see the nitty-gritty of how they did their code. Now though, most days, I don’t bother to check the code, and just trust that if they’re being linked to, they have good CSS.

So, when I visit gallery sites now, it’s mainly for visual inspiration, like “Wow, that can be done with CSS?” I also enjoy ScreenSpire.com quite a bit, even though it’s not a specifically CSS site.

Nathan Smith
October 10th, 2005
#

I have mixed feelings on this subject; -everyday i look at a lot of these “showcases” and the featured websites.. sometimes getting really inspired by it
-but everyday i see more of the same!

That’s what fad.tastic is here for. Trends are fun to monitor, if you view them from a large enough big picture. :)

Phil Renaud
October 10th, 2005
#

# Why do you visit showcases?

Just love too look at beatiful sites.

# Where will showcases go next?

Good question.

# Are there too many showcases?

Yeah, I only visit a select few. Some seem to let in ’so-so’-sites just for updating.

# How would you make showcases different? (layout/usability/interactivity/content)
—

# Which one is your favourite? (And why!)
Stylegala. Really good sites, not just webdesigners own sites or all the 9rules-sites and so on. Plus, there’s a lot more than just the showcase. The forums and the news, for example.
CSSBeauty. Beatiful sites. That’s it.

Markus
October 10th, 2005
#

Not sure if this link has been posted, but, it does contain quite a few of the above listed sites. Also, it may be a good idea to pass along to the maintainer of this link the links in the article.

Web Developers Handbook

And I agree, the showcase sites are awesome for inspiration.

-Josh

Josh
October 10th, 2005
#

Thanks for all your opinions so far. It seems inspiration is a big draw to the showcases. Keep the answers coming. :)

Does anyone visit to:

a) critique fellow designers’ work?
b) see if your designs are showcased?

Andrew Faulkner
October 10th, 2005
#

[…] Nice collection of all those css “inspriration” gallery clones. […]

davidbisset.com » Website Showcases And Galleries
October 11th, 2005
#

you missed this one:

http://smoothoperator.strund.jp/

The way i see it, the only ones that really matters and reputable is web standards award’s and stylegala’s.

Khairudin Lee
October 11th, 2005
#

you missed this one:

http://smoothoperator.strund.jp/

Check again! It was on the list. :)

The way i see it, the only ones that really matters and reputable is web standards award’s and stylegala’s.

And why, may I ask? Just curious.

Andrew Faulkner
October 11th, 2005
#

There’s a new showcase system over at:

http://www.dark-i.com/

Andrew Faulkner
October 15th, 2005
#

Thanks for the plug Andrew. I hope the site helps keep the debate alive. I’ll be interested in hearing what your readers have to say.

Michael Hay
October 16th, 2005
#

I think this is another one very good:
http://www.wordstudio.wz.cz

Ji31
October 16th, 2005
#

I think this is another one very good:
http://www.wordstudio.wz.cz

And see who’s in there… ;)

Andrew Faulkner
October 17th, 2005
#

Where will showcases go next?

I think they’ll probably be some sort of AJAX/Flash system going, wherein a user can tweak and edit other people’s designs and then post up their edited version for comments, to suggest improvements etc.

Might invade the author’s privacy a little, but they could check an option upon entering their site / confirming their site for entry not to allow this I suppose.

Tom Parson
October 27th, 2005
#

Argh! Sorry about that, don’t know what happened there (above).

Apologies.

Tom Parson
October 27th, 2005
#

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