While designing We Are not Freelancers we had one goal in mind. Our goal was to get featured on as many web galleries as possible.
This isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination, we had never achieved it before so why would we do it now? From start to finish this blog took about 8 days to create but I think of those 8 days I must have spent every hour of them on the design.
Why did we want to be featured on galleries?
Was it ego? Was it recognition?
It was a little bit of both.
But. The main reason was traffic and the spin offs of that. I strongly believe that if you are a start up blogger and you have a bit of a budget/time to play with you should really put a lot of focus into your design.
We managed to get featured on quite a few CSS galleries and the result was 2000 visitors per day for the first 5 days. That is a lot of visitors for a new blog.
A small selection of the featured sites are listed below:
That was only the start.
With that comes features on other blogs, We Are not Freelancers has been featured on many blogs for
- Impressive Blog Footers
- Doodles In Web Design
- RSS Subscription Design
- Creative Designs For Inspiration
- Web Design Illustration
Top this and Top that, best twitter birds, best headers the list can go on.
SEO
So getting featured is awesome, your ego gets stroked, your get recognition, you get traffic. But the most important thing is still to come:
SEO rankings… with all the sites we have been featured on, We Are not Freelancers has gained some serious back link horse power. We have put literally no effort into our SEO but, due to the amount of sites we have been mentioned on, our SEO rankings have been impressively boosted purely off back linking.
Get creative and then refine your design
So I highly recommend that you spend a bit more time on either getting creative or finding someone who is creative. We spent hours looking around, analyzing trends etc. We noticed that one popular trend which is under used is hand drawn designs. So we tackled it head on.
This isn’t the only trend out there which is under used. There are many, you just have to dig deep, discover a cool style get inspired, execute good padding, establish a grid structure and then refine, refine, refine.
If you are struggling a little then ask someone in the design world to have a look before you release it, people like Liam McKay are seriously friendly and helpful, Adelle Charles is another. Hell you can even ask me ;)
By doing so you will kick start your viewership in a big way which can only be a good thing for the future. Spend the time now and reap the rewards later, we spent many hours on this design but it not even close to the amount we would have had to spend on SEO’ing and hustling.
So what are you waiting for ladies and gents?!? Get cracking on an awesome design!
26 Comments
One of the reasons i re-designed Design Shard was to submit to galleries as well as getting some design recognition so i agree completly with this article, hopefully people will design some great sites or redesign there site after reading this! Thanks for the great post David
Nice Article!
Hopefully this will inspire more people to re-design their sites, and showcase them.
Aaron Irizarry´s latest blog post..Value Your Design
great article from a great guy !
thank for the tips. I’m currently spending weeks on the design of an online app with the hope to be featured just on that !
Considering the price of 125×125 banners on CSS galleries, I’d rather be featured !
keep it up obox…
Excellent post!
I’m in the process of re-designing my blog and I’m deliberately not rushing it and waiting until I’m completely happy with it before even beginning to code. In the past I’ve rushed in to coding and regretted it afterwards.
Graeme´s latest blog post..Another wee update
I can tell that alot of hard work goes into putting your best stuff forward to be showcased on those types of sites. Great work! I can only hope that one day I will have something showcase worthy.
Freddy Rodriguez´s latest blog post..FriDizeo Soup - 10 Great Adobe Dreamweaver Tutorials
Love the post. I’m cooking up a redesign of my blog right now. Your personal site design is so important!
Andrew Houle´s latest blog post..Freebie: MyInkBlog Snowflake Brushes
Very interesting idea - this aspect for now I haven’t been using much for now.
But yes, I can’t disagree - one more great way how to market Your website!
Dainis Graveris´s latest blog post..Night Before Christmas : Photoshop Tutorial And WallPaper
I am very glad everyone enjoyed the article!
Since creating We Are not Freelancers we have been putting in even more effort into our latest designs. This theory was 100% confirmed when we designed From the Couch, it got featured on a couple of galleries which was an awesome launch pad.
What I can definitely say is that trying to be creative alllll the time is tough as hell!
David Perel´s latest blog post..Advertising Strategy
I agree with you guys and think that great web design is the best way to get yourself out there, I would hope that everyone would strive for the same effect on their own site, but I guess thats a Designer thing. My site showed up in a lot of places I didn’t expect it to when I first launched it. I hadn’t thought of that when I was designing it, but I will surely keep it in mind in the future!
Thanks for the article!
Andy Sowards´s latest blog post..Daily Links
Good article. CSS Galleries really are a great way to increase traffic and backlinks. Check out The CSS Gallery List for a rundown of the best galleries organised by pagerank. you can even submit to dozens of galleries all from one form.
i agree with this article and is it very helpful. thanks
http://www.3dand2dmag.wordpress.com
Aleso´s latest blog post..Social Web Buttons - Set 1 | Botones Sociales para Web - Set 1
I totaly agree with this. A site’s design is the first impression, but it’s also the feeling users will get every time they visit the web, so it’s always more productive to spend time on that, than on SEO (which can drive you insane!)
The Ad Mad´s latest blog post..Metronomy - A thing for me
Great article!
this article says that i need to redesign my blog. lol thanks
insic´s latest blog post..The Five Styles of AJAX
That’s a great strategy for traffic. However, in the end, the usability of the site to visitors should outweigh the criteria used by galleries that tend to reward new layouts over proven ones.
Ed Kohler´s latest blog post..WhereTheLocalsEat.com’s Twincy Recommendations
Really nice post!
I’m planning to change my simple free template to suite my content (Tech+Sketch), and this post was really inspiring!
RaSh´s latest blog post..Sketch: Goodbye seniors!
I wonderful post with a great collection of resources. I have bookmarked it for future references!
Thanks! :D
Musab´s latest blog post..10 Most Popular Firefox Dark Themes
Note worthy. I think great design should go into all the work that a designer does. Doing a site that pull in 2,000 hits per day is no easy task. Job well done.
Godserv´s latest blog post..Time Is Almost Up
Once again, glad to be of some help.
We have even gone to point where we have extended client projects by a bit longer so that we can pay special attention to the design. We have convinced them that it is well worth the slightly extra cost.
So not only is it good for traffic but also good for business!
I thought I’ll drop by again to tell you that I posted about 20 Blogs you can’t live without and mentioned this post (and a few others) among my favorite ones on this Blog.
If you can spare sometime, drop by and let me know if I should add something else too! :)
RaSh´s latest blog post..Sketch: Lights, Camera, Action: The Winners!
Great job David, I redesigned my blog to submit to gallerys and because I just wanted exactly the feature I needed and nothing i didn’t.
John MacMenamin´s latest blog post..Sick of Vista? Try out Windows 7 Free!
Thanks for the tip! Makes good sense to make an awesome design and get more traffic. I check out a lot of web design galleries for inspiration, and so does a lot of other people, so there’s a good source of traffic there.
I’d love to do my own design for my blog, but I’m a little tight on money to buy hosting and a domain, being a student, so I’m stuck with having to use a wordpress.com blog template. It does nicely, but making a custom design would be better.
Ian Hutchinson´s latest blog post..Linux for Designers: Part 1
Great article! Great tips.
Some great tips their I have uploaded my latest web design to a web gallery
today.
Excellent articile, some great advice
Useful web design and seo are very tightly interconnected. Useful web design means - arranging and optimizing all elements on web page and using as more as links. With good seo in mind at the beginning of web design process — I mean on page factors of seo, not off page — followed by great web design. David Perel, thanks for sharing great resources, and thanks again for making very good choice.