Ranking 80 of the Top CSS Galleries

Web design and CSS galleries are a great source of inspiration for designers, and they are also an outstanding resource for designers to get exposure for their work. Getting a site featured in some of the most popular galleries can bring thousands of visitors and some valuable inbound links.

There are so many different galleries that it’s hard to know which ones are worth the time it takes to submit your site for inclusion. If you’re going to take the time to submit one of your designs to some galleries you might as well submit to those that will give you the best results.

What factors should be considered when choosing which galleries you would like to feature your work? Of course, galleries with more traffic will give your submission more exposure. Additionally, most galleries have RSS feeds and subscribers. So obviously the more subscribers a gallery has, the more exposure you will get. However, some galleries do not include screen shots in their feed. In these cases the subscriber will have to click-through to the site to view it, which will normally mean a little bit less exposure for your work. Also, with so many galleries out there, some are very active and some rarely add anything new. If you are submitting your site to a gallery that has added 75 new designs in the past month, you’ll have a better chance of being included than if you submit to a gallery that has only added 1 design in the last month. On the other hand, the more designs that are featured in a gallery, the less attention each one will get individually.

Because I think all of these factors should be considered by designers that are targeting CSS galleries, I thought it would be helpfulful to create a table that showed this data for a number of galleries. Using this information you can quickly identify which ones are the best choices to submit your work. The galleries are listed in order of Alexa rank, but you should also pay attention to the other factors as well.

If you’re looking to learn more about design websites, please see our post Learn Web Design for plenty of resources to help your educational pursuit.

UPDATE: Since this post was originally published, we have launched 5 galleries:

• CartFrenzy – Showcasing the best e-commerce websites
• Minimal Exhibit – Showcasing websites with a minimal design style
• Folio Focus – Showcasing the best portfolio websites
• Blog Design Heroes – Showcasing excellence in blog design
• TypeInspire – Showcasing inspiring works of typography

Some other collections of CSS galleries worth seeing:

• The Great Web Design Gallery Roundup – CSS Tricks.
• Inspiration Overload: 100 CSS Galleries You Need to Check Out – Virtual Hosting.
• 101 CSS Galleries for Backlinks and Traffic – Caroline Middlebrook

Published April 6th, 2008 by Steven Snell