CSS Showcase Websites Degrading?
If you are a website designer then chances are you have created your latest website and submitted it into the various CSS showcase websites out there such as Best Web Gallery.
The main purpose of these websites I feel is to offer inspiration for designers and wannabe designers and some DO offer great resources. I visit these sites daily as a rule and check out the latest designs by companies or freelancers and lately have noticed that a lot of these sites are starting to add anything with a bit of CSS into the gallery.
The problem with this is that new designers starting up are going to be looking through and thinking that the poor designs featured are normal and that this is what people want. To me it is a worry as I am one of the people who believe that the web should be a beautiful place and not full of fugly pages.
Best Web Gallery is a good place to start if you require true inspiration and up until recently others were a great inspiration. To promote inspirational websites is a good thing but to promote anything with CSS is going against the rules of the website being viewed and will surely kill the failing sites. Websites that showcase others work for inspirational purposes should endeavour to provide their visitors with great designs to be inspired by.
A website featured on a showcase site should be proud of the fact and tell people about it on their own websites but if people visit the site and see that they are also showcasing theworstpageontheplanet.com then it no longer becomes prestige and actually degrades it somewhat.
Do you believe that all of these sites serve a great purpose in aiding designers or do you feel the same as the fatman?
For inspiration in all things design related there is a resource site i solidly stand by and that is For Web Designers. FWD has links for all sorts of things including Ajax, CSS, Icons etc.
Edited for more information:
So just 24 hours after posting my last post regarding the CSS showcase sites going downhill, one of the more frequent sites i visit Design Shack has decided to feature a site that does indeed include a little CSS…. by little i mean LITTLE.
This is a link to the site they have featured Link. This particular site features ONE CSS style but yet has made it into the site which states the following “Design Shack is a highly regarded web design gallery and portal, which has been showcasing inspirational CSS since 2003.”.
Am i allowed to rest my case or do i need more proof?
Tags: Bestwebgallery, CSS, Degrading, design, Designer, Inspiration, Website
