+101 - Vote for the best sites on the web

Although we only approve good quality websites we know that a lot of people like to submit to CSS showcase sites and Flash portfolios to gain a bit of traffic and links from search engines. It’s a great idea and often, if you get onto the homepage of one of the popular showcase sites you can have a new site indexed in a matter of days. We’ve found that our other sites can gain hundreds of visits in a matter of days from CSS galleries.

Why not take this further and add a comment to your submission? Our simple comments system allows you to add more about your site, tell people why it’s good, why they should vote for your site and why it should be number 1. Those comments are readable by search engines so a good discussion can turn a single page with a description about your site into a page full of keywords and links back to your site.

On 101 Best Websites we also have a simple bookmarking widget to allow you to add your site page to various social networks and bookmarking sites. It doesn’t take long to gain momnetum and push a simple submission of a great site into a campaign to promote not only your design but also your site, company or product.

And remember all of our approved submissions get listed on our RSS feed and Twitter page: http://twitter.com/101bestwebsites

We now have over 1500 Twitter followers who get notified of every new release on 101 Best Websites!

We get quite a lot of submissions to 101 Best Websites and we go through every single one to make sure that our showcase only contains the highest quality sites.

For CSS sites we check the code: Is it standards compliant? Are there errors? Are there any unnecessary tables used for layout? Although we like to see high quality designs, sometimes the best CSS sites have a very simple structure and semantic HTML coding that works best.

With a Flash site it can be more tricky - we have to look at the design: does it feel modern and high-quality? Is the Flash built in a high quality fashion? We want to see smooth animations, new use of images and a functional site.

We try to add sites we feel are up to standard within a couple of days. If your site hasn’t been added to the showcase it might be worth taking a look at how it’s built and seeing if there’s any way to improve the HTML or CSS.

We always like to hear of ways you think that 101 Best Websites can be improved, let us know any ideas you have for the next version!

Since we launched last year we’ve been very busy on various other projects but have always tried to make sure 101 Best Websites was kept up to date and full of new and inspiring websites. The aim of building the site was to make it one of the premier design showcase sites on the web featuring the best CSS and Flash designs.

And now, just 11 months since we put the site live we have reached a milestone:

Over 100,00 visitors.

Over 500,000 Pageviews.

View a PDF of our stats

Over the last few months we have been developing a newer, faster version of the 101 Best Websites software which we will be releasing as soon as we have a few days spare to test and put live.

We’ll be shouting about it again, maybe another weekender!

Some of the features include:

• Better voting system
• Multiple images for each website
• Improved search
• Working pagination up to the 101st site
• Improved registration and user area

Let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see on the site and we will add it to our ever growing list of things to do to the site.

We’re very pleased that so many people like our site and use it regularly, we want to make 101 Best Websites the number one web design showcase site.

This years CSS Naked Day has begun - 9th April 2009 - with sites all over the world taking away their stylesheets in the hope of promoting web standards. We contemplated joining in with 101 Best Websites - we get a lot of traffic from web designers and developers who would understand what was going on and we’d like to show that this site isn’t just showcasing high quality CSS but can also hold it’s own with the best of them!

In the end, we decided that the pages were just too big and although everything works without styles it just didn’t feel right. So we’re sorry not to have joined the party but we’re there in spirit!

Find out more about CSS Naked Day

If anyone wants to show off their naked site get it submitted and we’ll link to the best from the blog as well as the main site.

One of my favourite design blogs Smashing Magazine has just published an article showcasing well designed tabbed navigation and it’s got me thinking about the navigation on 101 Best Websites. We’ve had quite a lot of interest about the simple navigation but I wonder if it could be improved… I’m talking about the links through to categories and topics, not the main site menu.

When I first designed the layout I was thinking of only having 3 or 4 topics under the main categories but as we developed the site further I realised that this was going to increase - and now we’re looking at adding a few more topics in there.

What would be your ideal categories? Do we need the DOM/AJAX tab or should we concentrate on more Design led site list?

For the topics we took our lead from sites such as Digg and Reddit but maybe we need to look a little bit more at the sites we get regularly submitted and concentrate on the best of design: portfolios, design agencies, development companies etc.

I still don’t think a traditonal tabbed menu would work in that space, it would distract from the site list too much and wouldn’t allow much flexibility. As we get working on the site more over the next few weeks there may be a few changes appearing, let me know your thoughts!

Showcase of well designed tabbed navigation - from Smashing Magazine

Over the last 6 months we’ve learnt a lot about how the voting system works.  We’ve studied the stats, looked at trends, and discovered that there needs to be some changes!

The idea of 101 Best Websites was always to create a fair representation of how good a websites is, based on it’s design, functionality and usability.

Some users would submit their site, we’d authorise it, then invariably they user would come back, vote their site high (understandibly) and then every body else the lowest.  One case in particular, the user voted over 200 sites down over a two hour period!  This pattern then continued with various different IP addresses for a few weeks.

The other issue we’ve encountered is Spam Bots.  I’m not sure how they work, but they manage to spoof a different ip address and create unfair statistics.

Using all this information, we’ve managed to upgrade the voting system to create a new, fairier reflection of users votes.  It will take a few weeks before the old votes are outdated (we feel it would be unfair to remove old votes), but you should start noticing some differences very soon.  With at least 2,500 page impressions a day now, we have the traffic to get things sorted

We would love to tell you how it works in detail, but then this might offer the people out their trying to fool the system a way to do just that, again.  Basically though, if your voting average is very low for a period of time, your votes won’t be registered.

Happy voting

101bestwebsites.com

After a few weeks of problems with the RSS feed we have finally got it sorted and working correctly. Not sure why it stopped working but you can now subscribe via Feedburner.

The Twitter feed is now working as well! https://twitter.com/101bestwebsites gets updated with all the news and latest sites we’ve approved and you’ll appear on the homepage here if you mention 101 Best Websites in your own Tweets

We’ve finally cleared some space in our schedule to get working on all the little bugs and errors on this site so expect to see more improvements and announcements over the next couple of months.

Thanks for all your support so far, keep those submissions coming in!

Can you believe we’ve had this site up and running for six months now? We can’t! Six months of 101 Best Websites. We’ve been so busy working on other projects and just popping on here to approve submissions and check everything is going ok that the time has just flown past.

And there’s still stuff we haven’t managed to cram in - so much for our “Build a web app in 48 hours”, this is turning into the longest 48 hours ever. But, we have some time coming up in the next couple of months that we’re going to dedicate to fixing a few issues and adding some features to this site:

• Getting the comments/SEO reports/rankings styled up a bit better
• Getting the rankings to work!
• Sorting out the pagination
• Only allowing 101 sites in each category to appear (the original purpose of the site)

We’re also planning to get a few other ideas for improvements and that’s where we need some help… What would you improve or add to the site? Or even off the site: a facebook app or iPhone app to add/vote for sites. Would you like to see a little gadget to add to your site to show off your position on 101 Best Websites?

Any and all ideas welcome.

Alexa is an online tool used by many to guage how their website ranks against others on the worldwide web.  To understand how important a page rank is, fistly we need to understand how it works.

Alexa has it’s own toolbar which users install into their browsers, then when people with this toolbar installed visit a site, Alexa can then pick up details of traffic for the site that that browser visits.

There are many issues with this method of data collection, but the primary problem is that not everyone in the world has, or ever will, install the Alexa toolbar.  This leaves the majority of the worldwide demographic site visits un metered.  

So who would install the Alexa toolbar?  Well, people like me, geeks.  Anyone who is involved in the Internet industry will have it installed on their browser to help them work out how the site their looking at or working on is ranked by Alexa.  

My Gran, for example, when she’s shopping online for a new cross stitch kit has no interest in what Alexa has to say about the sites she’s visiting, who Alexa are, what jumpers I actually want to wear on Christmas Day or how to make custard that’s not lumpy.

All the sites my Gran visits, and my parents for that matter, the majority of every major blue chip company in the world with network lock downs on software applications and people with no interest in web development.  Leaving a pretty small demographic.  People like me, and I’m guessing like you because you’re reading this article, and the rest of the internet development community worldwide.

This leaves only one conclusion:  The Alexa Rank of a site is a rough indication of traffic from individuals with an interest in web development, world wide.

My personal opinion is that it’s a great yard stick on most sites and a slightly better yard stick on a site like 101bestwebsites.com; a lot of the people visiting this site might well have a good interest and understanding of the web.

We have now successfully moved over to new hardware which will comfortably deal with our traffic rates.

The site is now back to normal and you can submit sites as before.

Regards

The +101 team