I waited until a month after it's launch before blogging about SITEJOY last year. It was a project I had thought about on and off for about a decade, so it was really satisfying to see it go live.
Over 700 sites in a year
By the time this post is published, 775 sites will have been posted to the site. That's a huge number considering I thought it would be really hard for modern websites to meet given the criteria I had set for submissions.
In truth, at least 90% of sites I've discovered my self. There have been a few submission, but as the gallery grows I'm sure I'll see more over time.
I fully expected to be in the low hundreds at best, so I've been blown away with how many sites make the effort to build fast and responsive websites. But that hides the reality of how much work there is behind the scenes to create the content for SITEJOY. At least 50% of sites I come across take an age to load so don't even make it into the queue for review. Another 10% don't work on mobile, so again they're excluded.
That remaining 40% then has roughly a 50/50 chance of making the criteria. Right now, I've reviewed exactly 1,550 sites and only 775 have been accepted. Take into account the rejections I've already mentioned, then that means we're looking at 775 out of 3,875 sites worthy of inclusion. That's a ratio of 5:1 (or 4 rejections to every 1 site that is published). That's higher than I thought it might be but pretty damning for the world of front-end development.
What's next for SITEJOY?
I'm not far of the 1,000 mark and I'll make that in the the next 4-5 months I think.
Beyond building on the quantity of sites, I want to work on the data behind the scenes a bit better. I really need to create a "100 Club" area for those sites that achieve a 100 score for both desktop and mobile in Google's Lighthouse/Pagespeed tests.
It would be nice to do the same for sites that work without JavaScript and maybe even for those that actually have 0kb of JavaScript.
Lastly, the two bits I've been very lax on are categorising each site. I have the ability to choose a category and the primary colours in use. The latter just became way too time consuming, but I'm going to change it from exact values to ballpark. In stead of specifying the exact hex code, I'll just mark it as black/red/blue or whatever the correct value is.
For actual categorisation, around half of the sites are done, but I'm thinking of changing this so that each site can only have one category rather than allowing multiple. I think that's what's caused me the biggest pain here. It's a two step process, and optional, so it doesn't get take care of enough.
I'll also be trying to factor in more sites and apps around all of the great portfolios I've featured. Portfolios are much easier to find and I've found that I can gauge their suitability quite quickly but they don't always tick the 'designed well' box. But I am working on it.
Overall, it's been a really interesting year with SITEJOY. As I said, it's was a decade long goal of mine to share a gallery of fast & responsive websites. I'm really proud of the site and service I've built up.
I'm also quite proud of the automations I built up around sharing to Instagram. I'll share my process for creating the backgrounds in a future post, but @sitejoydev is well worth a follow if you're looking for web design inspiration.
If you have a site you would like me to consider, please get in touch via Twitter and I'd be happy to give your site a look.
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