New changes at Liquid Designs

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on Liquid Designs in an effort to help the site grow in the right direction and improve a lot of areas that were suffering. A month ago I felt like closing the site. I’m not kidding. I had over 2000 subscribers but usually no more than 1,800 page views in a week, and I was posting new gallery entries every day (this still hasn’t changed). As much as I wanted Liquid Designs to be viewed as more of a resource site than a design gallery, people were still dropping it into every laundry-list of CSS galleries across the web. Sure, the site is profitable in that it pays for my server bills and leaves me with some pocket change, but it’s a one-man show and sometimes it just feels like work. There was one time long ago when I asked if others would like to join the project and help me out, but that didn’t go very well. After that I decided that I would maintain the project myself and it has stayed that way to this day. The only things that kept me from closing the site a month ago is that I know it’s useful to some people out there and it’s still my pet project. It’s one thing I’ve done right on the web.

So I decided to get to work and make it better. The first thing I did was redesign the site. It took some time to put the graphics together and figure out the colors, but I think I finally have something that’s much better than the previous design. Here’s the previous design for reference:

At least this time around I made my own graphics rather than using dingbats (embarrassing, yes), and I have actual color rather than just black and gray.

The next thing I did was install a forum. I want Liquid Designs to be a place that people can visit to ask for help with their own work and get advice. Even if I’m the only one there answering questions, it will at least give me a chance to build a community into the site rather than just have it be read-only as it has been for over a year now. The forum software I installed is RS Discuss and the best part about it is that I was able to theme it directly from the administration interface. Registration for the forum is the same as the Wordpress registration so it’s easy to use.

The last thing I did was remove the “Submit a Site” form. 99% of the submissions I’ve been getting through this form lately have been spam or sites that aren’t actually liquid or elastic. I was tired of deleting so many useless e-mails so I decided to move the submission section to the forum. Anyone who wants to submit a site will have to sign up for the forum to do so, which in my opinion is better anyway because I want to promote involvement with the site over just having people who just pass by once to submit a site and never come back again.

Those were all the changes I made and now I guess it’s just time to sit back and see the results. The subscriber count at Liquid Designs is growing every day but I’m far more interested in seeing some action in the forum, even if it’s just sites being submitted. Here’s hoping for the best.