Website design galleries—like CSS Mania, Design Snack and dozens of others—are, it’s fair to say, not very good.
I do, as it happens, often browse these websites. Personally, I tend to frequent CSS Mania—I like its inoffensive design and tons of updates. But CSS Mania—just like its many counterparts—could and should be so much better.
Simple approach
The website design gallery is a very simple idea. Basically, galleries consist of screenshots of aesthetically-pleasing websites, with links to the websites themselves. Simple, and effective too, which is why they are so ubiquitous I suppose.
What website design galleries tend to lack is much text, explaining why exactly websites are nicely-designed. I think it would be nice if website design galleries did bother to review websites properly, and not just post screenshots lazily.
Typesites is a brilliant example of what should be done—it’s a website in which websites with nice typography are reviewed, rather than simply mentioned. The likes of CSS Mania should consider doing the same kind of thing.
Inspiring code?
An awful lot of website design galleries have “CSS” in their titles, suggesting that the galleries are supposed to be showcasing websites that are not only good-looking but feature good markup—namely, they are laid out using CSS as opposed to tables, and what have you. Indeed, here’s a quotation from CSS Mania’s FAQs page:
[There is] Basically just one [submission criteria for websites featured on CSS Mania]: web sites written in XHTML/CSS (tableless) with an appealing aesthetic.
Now, like most sane web designers, I believe that websites should make use of CSS for layout. (Although that quotation suggests that the table tag is pure evil, like marquee or font. In fact, tables are fine for their intended purpose: tables. Also, HTML is believed by many to be better than XHTML.) But should website design galleries feature only brilliantly-coded websites? No, they shouldn’t.
I come to CSS Mania etc. to look at websites which have nice visual design, and be inspired by that. I don’t look at some HTML and think: “gosh, that’s an inspiring bit of code.” And there are lots of nice-looking websites that just happen to have been coded by someone who has never read Jeffrey Zeldman’s orange book, apparently: the website of Eleven2, say.
And, in fact, CSS galleries do feature websites that are both nicely-designed and nastily-coded. Eleven2 was one of CSS Mania’s best websites of 2007, despite the fact that it still uses tables for layout, and so on.
This is good. But why does CSS Mania set its own silly rules, and then go and break them? I have no problem with websites which aren’t brilliantly-coded, but why does CSS Mania pretend to care but clearly, and sensibly, not?
A glimmer of hope?
It’s not all bad. As I said earlier, Typesites is good, and hopefully we will in future see even more worthwhile takes on the website design gallery format. I am entertaining the idea of launching my own, in fact.
But still the majority of website design galleries are clones, clogging up the internet. They all showcase the same websites, too: I just checked out CSSclip, noticed that they had featured a website called answerJam, and sure enough, it had also been featured on CSS Mania recently.
As I type these words, Zeniltuo.com lists 154 website design galleries, and that’s just in the “CSS showcases” category. I find nothing wrong with web design galleries as such, but the fact that there are so many of them, all the same, and a bit flawed, leaves much room for improvement.
June 30th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Joshua! As stated in Cssmania About Section:
“Sure, we use other CSS showcases as input, but we also pay close attention to feedback we receive from other non-pro users who also know quality and good looks in a web site when they see it.”
Regarding your “table” usage, i would suggest you to read this:
http://www.topxml.com/xhtml/articles/xhtml_tables/
We do not break our silly rules…. in any case, if we did, you have the contact form to let us know as others are doing.
In any case, we are fine with what we are doing.
// Gabriel
June 30th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Thanks for commenting, GaBuBu.
I’ll admit, regarding the first point you addressed, that there is a limited number of well-designed websites.
In fact, the issue is not with you guys at CSS Mania. I like CSS Mania. It was one of the original website design galleries. My problem is more with the rash of copy-cats which have sprung up, wanting a piece of the action and doing exactly the same thing. One can have too much of a good thing, I suppose.
Congrats to you and your fellow Spaniards on last night, by the way.
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Hi Joshua,
I just wanted to stop by and say thank you for the kind words on Typesites. It’s very much appreciated and the fuel that keeps the site going.
Cheers!