Css Gallery Sillyness
I’m thinking about opening my own css gallery in the coming weeks - this one will be brand new, with some features you won’t see anywhere else: thumbnails, voting, and commenting - oh my! I even plan on showcasing the same sites that every other css gallery is showing, maybe even at the same time!
A word to the wise, css galleries are over.
The (Lack of) Need for Galleries
Each day, new CSS Galleries pop up all over the net. They get submitted to digg, score a fair to high amount of diggs, and instantly have more feedreaders than Devlounge. How is this possible? CSS Galleries appeal to many because it’s free site promotion. To the webmaster, it’s an opportunity to get thousands upon thousands of site owners to submit their sites, and stack up traffic in a very short period of time, without much effort.
But with such a surge in the creation of css galleries, is there a need for any more? Certainly, people think so, because they continue to pop up all over the place, with promises of being so much different than all the others.
Centralizing Submissions
The need for CSS Galleries also was derailed with the launch of none other than Css-galleries.com, a site using rss to showcase sites featured at 20 popular galleries. 20 galleries all on one site! Why subscribe to any other one again? (I can only imagine the feedreaders on CG, since I see individual css gallery sites with hundreds.) CG was a killer idea, and an absolute must alternative to visiting every single site to check if your site was showcased or not.
Standing Out in an Overcrowded Field
Still convinced that you can start a css gallery than will blow people away? It is extremely hard, but consider a few of these keys if you believe your gallery will lead you to greatness.
- Be original! When 20+ other galleries are all showcasing the same design within a few days of each other, that’s nothing but major overkill. Keep your visitors wanting to come back by featuring sites no one else has.
- Narrow down your selections to one topic. I came across a css gallery a few weeks back that showcased only horizontal scrolling sites. I thought that was a great idea, because it wouldn’t lead to the same old repetitive showcased designs found on every other site. Create your own random niche, and find sites that fit into it. Uniqueness matters people.
- More Features - Commenting and voting is boring, because every gallery offers it now, and still, not many people take advantage of it. Come up with something new, like daily head to head battles between the days showcased sites, where the highest voted site wins S.O.T.D or something like that.
- Update frequently … or, infrequently. Having fresh content is important, but at the same time, sometimes leaving a while before adding new submissions keeps people coming back. Look at Stylegala. Even with a new owner, the frequency of accepted submissions remains very low, but yet, I doubt the traffic has dropped much. Of course, SG has other features to get people returning, but it’s main purpose - being a design gallery - has really taken the backseat.
My Favorites
Some of my favorite galleries are Tom.ma, which is a “screenblog”, which serves its purpose. Simple, effective, and to the point. No extra goodness, just thumbnails and larger image screenshots.
Others include cssremix, and of course, cssgalleries to put them all together.
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Death to galleries…
Only ones I subscribe to is CSS Beauty and Stylegala. I have very high standards for galleries just because there’s way too many and I don’t care about 99% of them.
First of all, the gallery itself has to be well-designed and coded, otherwise I don’t trust the opinion of the person in charge. This eliminates most of the galleries off-top.
Second, if it was once I a gallery I frequented and it is sold to another person (CSS Vault, Unmatched Style), I usually unsubscribe because they are usually bought it to make money from inbound links and advertising.
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@Chris Griffin,
I agree with your comment on well-designed and well coded. The big differential is between someone that can design well, and someone that can translate that design to web standards and accessible markup.
Too many times, the emphasis is on design, not markup. Where are the markup galleries?
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I’m just wondering when this phase will stop. Really, there are so many showcase sites that can show the same sites over and over again. The only ones I have on my bookmarks are CSS Beauty, Stylegala, and Inspiration King.
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Yeah I agree, it just seems as designers will always be willing to submit their work for free promotion, people will continue creating new galleries for quick traffic :-/
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It is interesting to see a few niche galleries popping up. I launched LightOnDark earlier this year which only features sites with light text on dark background, and Shop Bunker launched recently, only features eCommerce sites, I’m sure there will be more.
Also, another way to keep up-to-date with the popular galleries without visiting 20 sites a day is to use:
http://www.mostinspired.com
(Disclaimer: I developed the site)
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You forgot to mention CSS Import, that’s one of the best sites IMO. They feature quality stuff there.
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Intersting read, but as the owner of cssremix.com my traffic begs to differ about the “site gallery craze” dying anytime soon. What I think is important for any Gallery site to maintain is consistency with the sites they showcase. At cssremix, I set the bar pretty high, and I think thats what keeps most visitors coming back.
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Why so many CSS Galleries? Simple. Content is the hardest thing to come up with on the internet. Original content? Mythical. But metacontent is simple. CSS Galleries allow people to whip up their own design sillyness, and have a standard, limitless content feed to power the site. Why try to be original when you can just link 50 other people’s poor attempts at doing so?
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how about just having galleries of good design, good illustration and get away from ‘css’ which should be an integral part of what you do, not the be all and end all of design… oh and i HATE bloody css galleries that show blog after blog after blog…
BTW, visit my blog
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I actually found this site through Stylegala so maybe you shouldn’t be so upset about galleries :). As for CSS galleries, CSS has become an overused and meaningless term like Virtual Reality.
I visit Stylegala because the design bar is set very high and the community is very knowledgable. I just checked out CSS-Galleries and I didn’t like a single site on the first page.
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The secret behind a css showcase is the updating part. It will be like tha t always.
You are completely wrong when you say that stylegala hasnt decrease the statistics with the new owner.
It has, it went from 491873 unique visits a month ( his top month) down to 347661 unique visits for the month of July. Of course it has.
To put them all together, well it is a great idea as css-galleries and mostinspired are doing. But please, dont consider css-galleries as a cssshowcase, cause it is not (wrongly selected domain, Nick… go ahead and spend 8$ in purchasing a new one… you know my complaints in your webpage)..!
The updating is what makes the difference in a css showcase.
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Ah I see, I didn’t know the actual statistics of SG, I was just guessing because of their other features that maybe they were holding steady.
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Sure! Why do we need more CSS galleries, if all of those are displaying the same sites?
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Stylegala definately showcases the worst designs, that’s why we need other css galleries.
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What it boils down to is everybody is a critic. Design is very subjective so its easy for anybody to deem anything a good or bad design.
When somebody sets out to get noticed in the design world, which route do you think is easiest?
Designing? (no, as we all know not everybody has the eye for design)
Blogging? (no, not everybody can write great content, though I would say this is easier to do than designing, but who will respect your authority when it comes to the topic of design if you can’t design halfway decent)
Creating a Showcase site? (Doesn’t take much design knowledge to put together a bunch of screenshots, it doesn’t require any original content, and its very easy to get noticed as you start adding websites. The designer being showcased might even link to your showcase)
Exactly why you see a lot of “amateur” (and I’m not using that in the derogatory sense) designers creating design showcases.
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Yeah, it’s funny as every one tries to make a new and “unseen” css gallery.
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I can’t seem to get a hold of a gallery script that people are using such as CSSGALLERIES. I know it’s a trademark secret, but you think it’s a secret when 50+ websites are using the same user interface, code, and functionality?
Come on, people these days can become really greedy. Build a script similar to these CSSGALS and label it as open source, I need one! For my website — CLICK NAME –
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I fail to understand why people call design galleries, CSS galleries. Looking at a screenshot doesn’t say anything about the coding, neither are the comments or site structure geared towards the actual CSS used. It seems to be a leftover from the time when csszengarden was proving its point. I really doubt there are many designers left who have to be ‘converted’ from tables to CSS, I hope if someone decides to make a new Style Gallery they are able to at least add a sustantial amount of innovation, enough to get users coming BACK.
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I think that galleries still have a place. Granted, there are plenty of galleries that show the same content in the same way and this isn’t great but some really innovate. MostInspired works like cssgalleries and this is a real place to seek inspiration.
We’ve just started a little gallery to showcase the little trends that make up designs:
http://fadtastic.net/wp-content/plugins/falbum/wp/album.php
(I hope links are allowed here. If not, please delete.)
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@GaBuBu
Where are you getting these stats from? As I am the owner of Stylega I would be very interested to hear of your source of information. As far as I know this information is not available in the public domain. I would also question the accuracy of your data.
@John
Please feel free to suggest suitable sites to review for the gallery. It is positive contribution from the community that made and continues to make Stylegala the success it is today.
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Why not make a css gallery showcasing other css galleries? I bet there isn’t many just focused to that.
I get what you mean with too many css galleries, it’s getting mad! The best one out there atm is cssremix!
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I love looking at cssexchange.com
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Great article, I’m considering featuring it. I launched my own CSS Gallery recently (www.cssfirst.com) as I personally do not believe that the concept of CSS Galleries are entirely dead. I just think that too many galleries out there provide poor content that is rarely updated. I’m aiming to update more frequently than any other gallery out there and to provide higher quality content, that other galleries are not featuring. I definitely think that increased competition is resulting in higher quality galleries, which can only be a good thing.
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I consider also that there are too many css galleries on internet but anyway this is not important. Only a few of them are very good. I have started my own gallery csscreme.com at the beginning of 2008 and I saw since then that there is a lot to do to get in front. Its not only about showcasing new sites. Its about having an identity and bringing cool stuff, original content. I have created free css templates for example, free wallpapers and also other free stuff. I have created favorites system for logged in people to place their sites in a favorite section on my site. There are plenty of new ideas that are to be done but key to success I think is patience and hard work.
As a final idea concurence is good and will always be… and if you want to have your own gallery number one then you must work like hell and not hope you will launch a site in 2 days and in the third one will hit the market.. cause its never like that.
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Thanks for this. Article who your writen was so important for me. Thanks again
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Here is an ecommerce design gallery, Cart Craze, http://cartcraze.com