To help you understand what can make or break your site, I decided to detail some of the things I consider when evaluating whether a site belongs in the dezinspiration gallery.

First of all, our current guidelines (from the submission page):

DO

• Submit sites designed by you or your company
• Exceptional designs you come across
• Sites that do a particularly good job in the following areas…
  • Look and feel
  • Layout
  • Formatting
  • Fonts
  • Photos/illustration

DON’T

• Spam us
• Submit sites that use widely available templates
• Submit sites that are not custom designed (i.e., from a site like Template Monster)
• Sites that have a major defect in any of the following areas…
  • Look and feel
  • Layout
  • Formatting
  • Fonts
  • Photos/illustration

Here are some further hints

• Navigation that helps you know where you are. 
• Mouseover effect on navigation are nice as well. Be careful with flash though.
• Quality fonts in all areas. Try to move away from the default choices if possible. Play with letter-spacing and line-height. Using images for heading and titles is Ok so long as you provide alternate text.
• This may be the only place you get this advice, but tasteful use of design trends can usually help you get into a lot of design galleries. Some notable trends:
  • Super large fonts
  • Wood-grained background
  • Large image or banner on homepage
  • Simple, clear, bold statements about who you are or what you do
  • Drop shadows, glowing elements, gradients, and rounded corners

Bonus marks

• Great illustration and/or use of icons
• Proper use of design metaphors (see LightCMS with it’s “building” theme)

Stuff can get you turned down

• Unreadable fonts (too stylized or too small)
• Unnecessary movement or motion. Movement should draw your eye to important elements, not away from them.
• Lack of a strong sales pitch or call to action. What should a visitor do when they come to your homepage?
• A bad logo. Sorry I know you don’t always have control over this, but a bad logo can kill a design. Your clients should know this.
• Confusing or poorly implemented navigation and site structure.
• Poor writing.
• Using the same design elements as everyone else (sorry famfamfam).

One Last Piece of Advice

Remember, the people who run design galleries are people (often designers themselves). They can be sweet talked and influenced (or annoyed) just like everyone else. Treat them like your friends, they’ll become your friends. Treat them like a tool, they’ll treat you like a tool.

I’m a little slow on this, but eduStyle has annouced the winners of the eduStyle Awards on July 22nd in Atlantic City. There were eighteen categories with both judged and peoples choice winners. I won’t give anything away, you’ll have to visit eduStyle to see the winners.

Luckily, I came up with a different solution that allowed me to use Jpegs for all sites today moving forward. Maybe at some point when I feel up to it I’ll convert the rest of them over, but that might be a far off day.

If there are any other little issues that bug you, be sure to post it over on the feedback page, http://feedback.dezinspiration.com/

Thanks to the wonderful folks over at UserVoice, we now have a fancy feature request/voting system. Vote up a feature you’d like to see or write-in your own. You can also add comments and specify a priority. Very democratic

To use it, just click on the “Feedback” button on the right side of the screen or go to http://feedback.dezinspiration.com/

Now get to it!

We’ve got some more cool features coming down the chute, so stay tuned.

Just came across this today (I know it’s a little old). I’m not opposed to jumping on design trend bandwagons, but these won’t get you into any gallery automatically. It’s all about the execution. In fact, there are probably many more designs in dezinspiration outside these 9 as there are in. I would argue it doesn’t really matter what style you choose as long as you put the time in and pay attention to the details.

Cleverful is a talented design company with a smart looking website. They’ve noted on their blog the impact of being featured in a number of design galleries is having on their business:

Cleverful was recently featured on a few different design sites, mainly CSSElite.com.  Since then we have been receiving roughly four requests an hour for custom design work, php coding, exclusive contracts and wordpress help.

CSS Remix (the orig) on the left and CSS.WeAreTheBuzz.com (the rip) on the right.

I’d encourage you to post your comments supporting CSS Remix either on his Digg post or this one.