Although it’s not yet fully supported across all browsers and the spec is still in discussion, the basics are now known and developers areound the world are starting to embrace the new HTML standard. If you’re unsure of what the differences are and how it will affect you as a designer and front end developer, take a look at our new 101 Best site:

http://101besthtml5sites.com/

We’re trying to get together a gallery of the best HTML5 sites including demos and tutorial sites to help you get started producing your own HTML5 website.

Let us know what you think, and start submitting your own sites to the list!

The new features include:

• Editing and ownership of your submissions
• Up to 4 images per site, either automated screen shots or directly uploaded from your desktop, realtime!
• Time sorting – view entries in time order so you can see what’s hot now
• Vastly improved performance.  With 200,000 votes to sort through, this was a key element.  For the geeks amongst you, we have our page execution times down to under 0.01 of a second
• Greater security for all users with a much improved user authentication system

We’ve achieved all of this whilst still maintaining our XHTML Strict validation, and still kept the site as accessible as possible using unobtrusive javascript and allowing every aspect of the site to degrade properly.

There’s also the addition of a Disqus comments system which will allow more in depth discussion of the sites and design.

Take a look around and let us know what you think!

In other news, we’ve just launched another 101 site – 101 Best Twitter Apps we’ve added nearly 50 apps to the directory already so you can take a look and see how the new 101 Best Websites will work once we’ve moved eveything across. The categories and topics might need a bit of refining on the Twitter Apps site and we’re open to suggestions.

101 Best Twitter Apps is a list of the top Twitter widgets, desktop applications and automatic tools to improve your Twitter experience. It joins our growing group of 101 best application sites. You can find out more about the other 101 best sites here.

We haven’t forgotten our design roots though and are looking at launching another site in the next couple of weeks for showcasing the best in design – from architecture to print and automotive to modern art… Watch this space for more info

Always considered a very difficult colour to display on a monitor it seems that designers out there are geting bored with the blues and greys and want to experiment and try something new. And it certainly makes a site stand out!

I’m not sure about full screen yellow though, that’s still a strain on the eyes but sometimes it works…

Over the last few days we’ve had more yellow submissions than I can remember ever having, I’m trying to separate them out a bit when I authorise them but it’s proving hard – so…. what do you think? Is yellow a viable web colour? Is it still too tricky to get right?

The big news though is our growing list of 101 Best sites! As I’ve mentioned we’ve been working hard on a new bit of code and we’ve finally got it to a stage for us to use as the main backend system for the 101 Best sites.

Our new sites are:

http://101bestandroidapps.com/

http://101bestblackberryapps.com/

http://101bestiphoneapps.com/

Although 101 Best Android Apps isn’t strictly new we’ve managed to transfer over the users and send out emails to everyone to let them mknow the new features. Why not check them out and see what’s coming to 101 Best Websites. We’re hoping to start the mammoth job of transferring the sites and users next week for a relaunch the following week once everything has been tested and checked.

Although the design will stay pretty much the same it’s the new backend system that gives us more flexibility and the ability to add new features faster then ever before. There are a few nice touches though:

1. Submissions can now include up to 4 images.
2. The voting system has been tweaked to make it fairer.
3. You can now view the best sites over the last few days, months or all time.
4. The site list and pagination is better and now shows up to site 101 – is it better to be 1st or 101st?

Future developments will include:

• The ability to “claim” your site.
• External widgets to allow voting from your own site.
• Apps for various sites and mobiles to allow submissions and voting and showing off!

So, we’re looking for a big push this week, more visitors, more submissions and more high quality websites to add to the showcase. Over the last week or two we’ve seen more submissions than ever and we’ve been more selective about what we’re adding to the directory.

If you’d like to help us grow why not bookmark your favourite site design? Or link to it from Twitter or Facebook or your own blog?

We have some big plans over the coming weeks for a new site launch and major improvements of 101 Best Websites including: better site submission, profile pages, voting and comments. So any help to get more people reading and voting on the site is only going to make it better for everyone…

Any ideas to help us reach our target are appreciated!

Thanks,

The 101 Best Websites team.

We all need to keep up to date with the latest version of HTML and what the next version is going to hold in store for us. What will it change? How will our working process be affected?

There’s been a lot of talk recently about HTML 5 and I’m not going to repeat it all – that’s far to much work! But here’s a quick list to a few handy articles you might have missed:

• http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/ A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/06/html-5-cheat-sheet-pdf/ HTML 5 Cheat Sheet
• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5/ A Preview of HTML 5
• http://html5gallery.com/ A showcase of sites using HTML 5 markup
• http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/html-5-and-css-3-the-techniques-youll-soon-be-using/ HTML 5 and CSS 3: The Techniques You’ll Soon Be Using

Hope it’s useful!

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!

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!

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.