Basically the short answer is we’re doing some testing with a couple moderators to make sure permissions and other functions are working properly for them before we roll it out publicly.

Aaron and I like to do a lot of testing to make sure things are good before rolling them out on the live site. Bugs and issues are not fun to fix in a live environment with tons of traffic.

I still need to reply back to a few people who want to be moderators who sent in messages. I’ll work on that today.

Thank you everyone for your continued support of Get Free Web Designs. Please hang in, it’s coming.

At the moment, the available positions are for forum moderators only. You will not be required to approve or deny design template submissions.

I know a few people are interested in being a moderator on GFWD, but I figured it would be good to post about it again just to make sure who’s in or out.

So what will be required of you being a moderator on GFWD?

For now you will help keep the peace on the forum once it goes public. You’ll also remove spam type posts and/or comments. You’ll also have the ability to block or ban users who violate the forum rules, policies and guidelines.

Speaking of forum rules, policies and guidelines, they are still being ironed out but whoever gets accepted to be a moderator will help shape those rules. I do have some general rules to use as a base, but it would be good to get some moderator feedback on it since you will be part of the team here at Get Free Web Designs.

I’m also thinking it would be good to have moderators in different timezones around the world to help keep things running smooth morning, noon and night.

Ok, so if you are interested in helping out on GFWD by filling moderation positions getting ready to open up, contact us directly with the subject “moderator position”. Be sure to let us know where you are located and any experience you have in forum moderation and why you feel you would be a good moderator for GFWD.

The plan was to launch our forum sometime today (Friday), which is still the plan, however there might be a slight delay, not because the forum isn’t ready, but because I’m in the process of upgrading the server for our hosting to accommodate the expected spike in server load and traffic from having a forum on the site.

Our upstream provider tells me this upgrade should be done within the next 24-72 hours, so sometime between now and over the weekend is what I’ve been told.

So to confirm, the forum is complete and ready to run, we’re just waiting for our server upgrade to be completed before it goes live.

Thank you everyone (designers and users) again for all your continued support of Get Free Web Designs. Bakies for everyone :bakie:

We are really thankful for all the support the Open Source Web Design community gives GFWD’s. Many designers submit multiple designs which is great, however if you submit them all back to back, you won’t get extended home page exposure.

My advice is to submit one design, wait a few days (2-3), then submit another design and so forth, that way you will get good exposure on the home page as well as the inner design pages over time and not just one big push when you submit designs.

For SEO and better download counts, don’t forget to add tags to your designs when you submit them. Tags like “clean design” or “professional business layout” are just a couple examples to use.

So “what if” you forgot to add tags when you submitted your designs? Don’t worry because you can edit your design submissions from your GFWD dashboard and add the tags.

The above advice will be good for you as a designer and also the OSWD community as a whole. Put it into practice and you will see some amazing results.

Thank you again for your support. Here’s to the next 500 submissions on Get Free Web Designs :bakie:

:bakie:

Oh how I missed tasty bakies, as I’m sure you did too.

To get the bakie to show up in comments, use : bakie : but remove the spaces before and after the word bakie. I hope that makes sense.

I can’t give you an exact public release date at this time, but it’s safe to say it will be within the next 30 days or less pending no snags or hiccups with the current code work in progress.

Well today I can give you a launch date for the Get Free Web Designs Community Forum to be be live on the site. That date is Friday October 2, 2009.

So why a 2 week delay you might be asking? Well Aaron and I have been wrapping up some client projects for each of our businesses and also fine tuning things around GFWD to accommodate forum moderators and design managers. Also, a 2 week delay all things considered isn’t really too bad IMHO.

Let me just say “Thank you” for your continued patience and support of Get Free Web Designs while we get things ready.

So why the silence around the blog? Basically Aaron and I have been super busy working on various improvements behind the scenes for the site streamlining code, creating some new features, etc. and of course we both run businesses that require us to work on our “day job” paying client projects.

The most major change coming to GFWD’s is the launching of our Community Forum.

* Take a deep breath, yes you read that correctly. A forum is coming soon *

As most people know originally we didn’t want a forum for the site but over the past few months a real need has come to light and for the site to move forward and have even more community support then we already have, the Get Free Web Designs site needs a community forum and it’s going to happen.

The basic framework is already in place for the forum on our development server but before we move it over to the live site we are doing a lot of testing, tweaking, additional programming, and other magical things before we release it for public use.

I can’t give you an exact public release date at this time, but it’s safe to say it will be within the next 30 days or less pending no snags or hiccups with the current code work in progress.

I’ve already sent out a few emails to people who have shown an interest in being moderators, but if you haven’t received an email and are interested in being a GFWD’s Community Forum Moderator, get into contact with me.

Ok, that’s about it for now. Thank you again to everyone who is showing a ton of support for Get Free Web Designs. We appreciate everything you do.

At the moment I won’t mention any specifics of what new features are coming to the GFWD’s website but I will hint that something a lot of our users and Open Source Web Designers want is coming in a few weeks after we do a little more testing.

Currently we’re looking for a few people to help around the site and join our support and moderation team. If you are interested in helping out with user support or various moderation positions getting ready to open up, contact us directly or comment below.

In the coming weeks I will do a more detailed post on all of our upcoming web and application enhancements for Get Free Web Designs, so stay tuned.

We really appreciate everything that the Open Source Design Community does for us, so thank you as always for your continued use and support of GFWD’s.

What would be possible if browsing the web was as fast as turning the pages of a magazine? We invite you to join us in exploring and innovating across the entire spectrum of performance – from Internet protocols to the browser to website development. Together, let’s make the web faster!

Source: http://code.google.com/speed/

Google has put together some really good videos and an open forum for discussing ways to improve speed around the web, including design elements and open source technologies.

Take a look and lets get some discussion going on here on this blog post. Share your thoughts. Comment below.

As of this GFWD weblog post we now have 411 approved free open source web designs available for download.

Thank you again to all the designer and user support for Get Free Web Designs. Without you, GFWD’s wouldn’t be the site it is today.

Lets continue to move forward and make Get Free Web Designs a premier high quality source for free XHTML and CSS web designs.

However since I’m a geek with social skills I’ll have my laptop close by and working on Get Free Web Designs (while having a cold beer and some BBQ), so with that in mind I wanted to have an open call for new site feature requests.

So here is how it works, if you have ideas or a feature request that you would like to see here on Get Free Web Designs, leave a comment below with your idea or request. If you don’t want to leave a comment, that’s cool, you can always use our contact form.

As your feature requests come in, we will add them to our basecamp for possible inclusion into the GFWD source code and once we decide what will be added next, of course it will be posted here on the official Get Free Web Designs Blog.

All ideas and feature requests will be seriously considered by Aaron and myself because we want to make GFWD’s a top notch web design portal. We are already well on our way with 387 free open source web designs as of this post.

Thank you again for your continued support of GFWD’s. We really appreciate everyone who contributes to the site and helps support all the open source web designers. Have a nice weekend.

Cheers,

-Sean

As mentioned in a previous blog post about 338 approved web designs, our visitor traffic is really picking which is nice, so I wanted to share more visitor stats:

• December 2008: 1,253 visitors
• January 2009: 2,933 visitors
• February 2009: 6,059 visitors
• March 2009: 9,630 visitors
• April 2009: 12,270 visitors

Now for something really exciting, for the first view days in May we’ve already had 1,147 visitors which is really awesome since we are only 4 days into the month.

Thank you again to all of our open source web designers, site users and viewers for your continued support of Get Free Web Designs.

Currently the only 125×125 pixel banner on the site is an affiliate link which is in the right side bar of the site.

For those interested in some site stats, GFWD’s is currently a Google Page Rank 5 (PR5) with an Alexa ranking of 81,766 (and it’s improving daily).

Site traffic: For the month of March 2009 we received 9,360 visitors to the site which averages out to 312 per day which isn’t bad for the site only being public for a couple months.

As of this post, we have had 6,266 visitors and we still have approximately 2 weeks left in the month and of course the site traffic and exposure is building every day.

Here are my current thoughts for ad space on GFWD’s… I’m thinking of limiting the available slots to only 8 with a price of $30.00 USD per month and if people pay 3 months in advance, they would get a price break of $20.00 USD per month, so it’s like buying 2 months and getting 1 for free.

This is still a work in progress, but please share any thoughts you might have or if you have some interest in placing a 125×125 pixel banner on the site, get into contact for more information.

After you’re done reading this blog post, be sure to check out our awesome collection of Free XHTML and CSS based web designs. We currently have over 350 designs to choose from and more are submitted every day.

Our site traffic is also picking up and a lot of designers from the early days of OSWD are now submitting designs and contributing to the site which is nice.

I want to also welcome a good friend and open source designer Andreas Viklund who is also supporting GFWD’s. Check out his profile to see his awesome designs.

Again, a heart felt “thank you” goes out to all our other web design template contributors. Without you and your support, the site wouldn’t be where it is today, so again thanks for your continued support.

Congratulations to one of our design template contributors Reality Software for submitting the 300th approved design. Keep up the great work.

Also a big “thank you” goes out to all our other web template authors. Without you, the site wouldn’t be where it is today, so again thanks for your continued support.

Currently we show 12 designs on the home page. When you submit your designs, only submit 2-4 at a time, wait a week or so, then submit a couple more if you have them and keep repeating this process, that way you’ll get a lot of home page exposure and publicity over time and not just one big push.

I only bring this up because in the past a lot of designers thought it would be good to get all their designs up at once. That’s great if you want to add some templates and never look back, but for better SEO and top exposure of your awesome design work, keep my suggestions in mind.

The idea of Get Free Web Designs is to get you and your creative web design work the most exposure possible and with my suggestions, that will defiantly happen.

Keep up the great work everyone and thank you again for all your support.

Be sure to check out our free resources page. Lots of good stuff that’s completely free and will help you get on your way.

We will continue to add more free resources as we find them.

If you know of something useful to the web design community that should be on this page, let us know in the comments or contact us directly.

Worried about hot linking to images that load slowly? Don’t! This plugin will cache the 20 most recent design thumbnails in a directory inside your uploads directory. They’ll load as quickly as everything else on your site. Then, when they get too old to show in the widget, they are removed, which means they’ll never waste space on your site.

If you want to see this plugin in action, check out Attackr.com or Web Developer News.

You can download the Get Free Web Designs Widget directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Please keep in mind that you will need at least WordPress 2.7 and PHP5 for the GFWD widget plugin to work.

Be sure to keep watching the Get Free Web Designs blog more cool and exciting features from the GFWD’s development team.

Basically the new FAQ information has to do with user account registrations on Get Free Web Designs, so for those who read our blog, I’ll detail it here as well.

We are going to start pruning our user database on a regular basis. If you register an account on GFWD’s and don’t submit any designs within the first 30 days of having your account, it will be removed.

So why are we adding this policy to GFWD’s? Because you don’t need an account to download our free XHTML and CSS design templates.

However, if you register a user account and submit designs, your GFWD account will never be removed since you have designs available for download.

Be sure to check our FAQ page on a regular basis for more updates.