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Design Submission Rules and Guidelines

Rules

  1. Designs must be valid XHTML
  2. No table-based layouts, tables should be used for tabular data only.
  3. Text cannot be contained within images.
  4. Buttons (e.g. W3C) are not allowed in designs.
  5. All images must be your own and not copyrighted.
  6. No JavaScript / DHTML is to be used in your design.

A design that won’t conform with these rules will not be approved.

Guidelines

While we won’t remove templates for not following these guidelines, we highly recommend conforming to them.

  1. Try keeping your XHTML semantic and logically ordered.
  2. A CSS layout alone isn’t a template, please put some time and effort into the styling of the design.
  3. Keep all images optimized for the web. Please keep the total file size under 200 kb. Normally 50 kb is more than enough.

Outgoing Links

All outgoing links in the design previews may have rel="nofollow" added to them. Please note that we will not change the download file, only the preview page will be affected. Also, our design preview are set to noindex. Please note that this is done to prevent spam, and that we credit our designers in their profile page and on the homepage.

Sponsored Links

You are welcome to include sponsored links in your template(s) under the following conditions:

  1. Users must be free to remove the sponsored link(s) if they wish – you cannot force a user to keep the sponsored link(s) in as one of the terms of use for the template.
  2. A maximum of 2 (two) sponsored links per individual template is allowed.

The Open Designs site administrators and moderators have the final decision on what is classed as a sponsored link.

Uploading Designs

Place all of the required design files into a folder with your design name, and create a zip archive of that folder. Please do not use any special characters such as !, &, or ?. Please also use underscores instead of spaces when naming the folder.