Re-Design Observer

So what, the post title might be a play on words of one my favourite blogs, but still, it’s a fundamental part of the web cycle; websites get redesigned. Some more often than others, some better than others, but there always will be redesigns. From a designers perspective seeing these redesigns can be as useful, if not more so than the abundance of CSS galleries and design inspiration websites. Successful redesigns of large and well followed websites are likely to offer a great insight as to current and future design trends.

It is an unfortunate fact then that these redesigns are poorly promoted and information about them is scattered across the web.

How about this: a CSS gallery style website detailing all the latest redesigns. This has enormous potential and would be of interest to almost every designer I know, if not a wider audience.

The issues involved with the site would be gathering the information and then using the information. A simple submission setup might be sufficient to aware of most new designs, relying on the sites users to pick them up. This would also lead in to people promoting their own new indie site, which isn’t necessarily a problem as everyone has to start somewhere.

The problem that remains, how would the designs that people really want to see be kept prominent on the homepage? By taking details about the sites Google and Alexa rankings it would be possible to get an indication about it’s popularity. If you were to then mix in a rating tool where users of the gallery would gradually pick out the designs they really want to see you would inevitably see the popular designs appearing on the front page. If you wanted to get even more accurate it might even be possible to automatically detect a websites feed and then examine how many RSS subscribers it has, in the current web climate your subscriber count really is a good indicator of your site popularity.

So there you have it, one more idea for your thinktank. It is interesting to highlight just how often RSS feeds are coming up in discussion, which leads me to a final thought that there must be plenty of brilliant ways to use and analyse feeds which we just haven’t seen, yet.

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