CSS Galleries are awesome

When I put my new website design live one of the first things I did, once I remembered, was to submit the site to some CSS Galleries, and it’s lucky I remembered as the result has been awesome.

Traffic

The most obvious result of being featured on CSS Galleries is an increase in traffic and as the image below shows the impact on a small site can be astounding.

For a site like mine the spike of traffic has reached 100 times the normal daily visitor count. After three days the traffic is 1/4 of that I had received in the previous 18 months.

Of course this level of traffic will not last forever, the majority of those coming from CSS galleries will never lay eyes on my site again, but that’s okay. The point of adding a website to a CSS gallery is not to get that large spike of traffic but to hopefully peak enough peoples interest so they keep returning to your site, subscribe to your feed or get in touch. Adding even a few extra visitors to your site makes using the CSS galleries worth it.

Work

Even if your website doesn’t retain that many new visitors it could lead to new work. Out of those hundreds of new visitors to your site a few may like your design style and get in touch to ask you to do some work for them. Then if you do a good job here you could be inundated with work as these clients refer other people to you. Next thing you know your turning away work or employing people in your own business.

SEO

So after a week your traffic drops back to normal and your website didn’t attract any more work, there’s still benefits to be had.

Although Google are looking to rid the world of PageRank you can see that many CSS Galleries have some good PageRank scores. Having these sites link to you actually passes some of the authority these sites have to you. The number of links a site has going to it and the authority of these sites linking to you all go to help your own search engine rankings, and of course higher rankings usually means more visitors.

Did I get what I wanted?

I’ve not received any new work but as I work as a full time designer this was never a concern for me as it would be for a freelancer. Although the traffic is a vanity thing so far the increased traffic hasn’t fallen back to original levels so hopefully this will continue. The SEO benefits will hopefully help keep the number of visitors up too.

The main reason I have for using CSS galleries is to get that warm fuzzy feeling inside when people are visiting something you worked hard on. If people keep coming back then I know that working on the site design and the articles is worth it, and maybe some of it may inspire or inform other designers.

Thanks

Last but my no means least I want to thank the following websites for featuring my site. I know it’s a pretty small gesture but by linking back to these sites it’s a damn site cheaper than sending out thank you gifts.

• CSS Based
• CSS Design Yorkshire
• CSS DSGN
• CSS Mania
• CSS Mayo
• CSS Loggia
• Design Fridge
• Most Inspired
• Nice Stylesheet
• We Love CSS

Lastly I must also mention Abduzeedo who included me in their sites of the week next to the frankly awesome 31three redesign.