In the last few months I’ve been listening to user feedback and working hard in implementing new and exciting features to OpenDesigns. Also, as more and more awesome designs were submitted, it became harder and harder to browse them all, so a solution was needed.
Today I am proud to announce the launch of the 3rd major revision of OpenDesigns.org. Here’s what’s changed:
- New clean and streamlined interface
- Design Rating
- Tag Cloud
- Advanced search of designs by category, color, contrast, columns, layout, license, validation and keywords. This search feature should be faster and more accurate than any previous search feature.
- Design rating. Now users can give a rating to their favorite designs. As the ratings build up, more rating related options (such as search by rating) will be introduced.
- Design comments
- Social bookmarking for designs
- Top contributors are credited on the home page
- Downloaded zip fies now have proper names
I am looking forward to your feedback, so that we can get started on the next round of improvements.
While uploading and browsing designs were always straightforward, finding the the needle in the haystack has always been a challenge. With over 1500 designs available on OpenDesigns, it’s getting harder and harder for a user to find the right design, and allot of awesome designs are not getting enough exposure just because they are way back in the archives.
We are developing a simple and friendly design search solution, and one of it’s features is design categories. Currently the categories are basic, but we are open to suggestions.
I would like to call all designers to come and set categories to their existing designs. It can be done simply on the “My Designs” page. Sometime mid-april we will start categorizing any designs that were not categorized by the designer, so now is your chance.
The advanced search has some more cool features, all to be revealed soon.
Just a quick update: some designs submitted after December 4th 2009 were not uploaded properly due to a technical error in the site, caused by a recent server upgrade. Sadly, the issue was only noticed recently, because design approval is first come first serve, so it took a while till we had to deal with the problematic designs.
This issue has been fixed, and all designers who’s designs were affected have been notified. We would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused by this issue.
As a side note, many designs lately have been using the XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype, and failing validation where they would have passed as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. XHTML Transitional is accepted on OpenDesigns.org, but we cannot approve a design that fails the W3C validator. So, if you’re having trouble validating your design as as strict, you might want to set the doctype to transitional.
By LobsterMan, January 12th, 2009 Site updates
I’d like to announce a few exciting site updates. More amazing changes will be announced in the next few days.
- Speed: The OpenDesigns code is being revamped to preform less database queries. THis process should be finished in the next few days, and will eliminate up to %90 of all database queries
- Forums: The forums are now running on the awesome BBPress. This will improve speed, reliability and integration with WordPress, as well as enhance the overall user experience. You may notice that the forum posts from the last few days are missing. Well, it took that long to do the transfer, and we didn’t want the forum offline for that long.
- Forum Moderators: As much as we love free all the discussions going on around here, let’s admit: it becomes way too ugly way too fast. If you think you have it in you to be an official OD peacemaker, apply now to join the OD 2009 moderator lineup.
Open Designs is having a new contest. It will be a ‘garden’ themes contest, with each entry using the same HTML Code, but unique CSS. This presents a unique challenge, first pioneered by CSSZenGarden.
The contest will start on October 1st, 2008 and end on November 27th, 2008 midnight GMT. The results will be announced on December 3rd, 2008 when TODC enters it’s third year.
Be sure to check the Open Designs Forum for more contest information, get the HTML code, etc.
Just wanted to give the community some Open Design site stats… in the past 30 days, OD has had 96,215 unique visitors, which is 3,103.71 visits per day on average. We also had 477,715 Pageviews.
Out of the above stats, 28.12% is Direct Traffic, 34.18% is from referring sites and 37.69% comes from Search Engines (mostly Google).
First off, sorry for the delayed posting to our Open Designs news section. I’ll try and be better about updating the news section.
We’re now half way to our 2 year anniversary of Open Designs going online. As of this post, Open Designs now has 1,166 free website templates for your downloading pleasure and more are added daily.
Thank you to our members, users, designers, moderators and the admin team for continuing on with providing a great resource for open source web designs.
Keep up the great work!
Open Designs is now over one year old, and we have 900 free designs. This is hardly a fledgling community anymore. We have over 3600 registered users, about 100 of whom check in to the forum on a regular basis. The forum is more active than ever, with so many people around to contribute. We have had a great first year, and with a team effort, our second year will be even better!
As August comes to a close, Open Designs now has 713 free website templates for your downloading pleasure.
Soon we’ll be at 800 and maybe my the end of the year we will actually hit 1,000 quality open source web site designs.
Thank you to our members, users, designers, moderators and the admin team for continuing the great open spirit of open source web designs.
Keep up the great work!
That’s right folks, Open Designs is just around the corner from hitting 600 available designs for download.
Currently we’re sitting at 591 designs and I’m sure over the next few days it will be pushed over 600, so keep those quality designs coming.
Thank you for your continued use and support of OpenDesigns.org – we’ve come a long way in only 6.5 months. Lets keep the fire burning.
