We were recently featured in [1] Siti’s Web Design Gallery (thanks [2] J David for the submission). Some of my other favorite designs that are featured were [3] Art4web, [4] OwnYourC, [5] Mike McFarlane, and [6] David Behan.

Analyzing Siti’s system

Search designs by color
This is a neat feature to have. Since most of the entries are organized with tags this is probably an easy accomplishment. Simply link the pink square in your palette to every post that has the tag “pink”. Good idea that improves the usability by a ton.

The ranking system is a little bit slow
Someone ranked my site and told me it took 5 minutes for it to submit. When I tried it never loaded so I just exited the page. Since the ranking system is such an instrumental part of the process, they might consider their options with the ranking script– or at least find out what’s slowing it down so much.

There really aren’t any specifications
Their About page doesn’t really tell you what your site should have to be included. It’s general and doesn’t go in to many details:

Web Design Gallery is an inspirational gallery where we collect a wide range of hight quality designed websites (CSS, XHTML, Flash, PHP, etc.). Users can search for web designers or web agencies by tags and categories. Do you think we have missed your site? Feel free to submit it to us!

Maybe if they specified certain things, such as your site should validate vs w3c, etc.

This is a great idea for link-baiting purposes

Featuring someone’s site gives them that emotional connection that is often needed to make them take an action (giving the gallery a link back). Of course if you are commended for your work you’d love to tell everyone about it. You want people to rank your site, you want to show it off, you want to write in your blog about it, display an icon or whatever. This is a great way to create viral activity. Posting an image of my site got Siti hundreds of hits, and I’m not anyone with thousands of friends or readers.

Use this technique with your own blog

When you see something that works, you think of ways to adapt this idea to your own situation. How can you award your readers or bloggers who are doing a great job that would guarantee them to give you a mention? Give them an award that they’d be proud to tell other people about. Give them some kind of badge to put on their blog that lets their readers know they aren’t just some fly-by-night talking about stuff they have no reason to be talking about.

Use your imagination, and use this post as inspiration to get some brainstorming going. How can you give people what they want to get exactly what you want? In the mean time, [1] head over to Siti Web Design Gallery and get some inspiration, or just [7] give me a vote if you want to. You might have to wait for a second for your vote to count, but I’d definitely appreciate it!