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Allow Myself to Introduce … Myself
My name is Shane Pike, and I’m the new owner of Unmatched Style. Since UMS has so many regular visitors, I wanted to give you a little bit of my background and let you know my plans for the site, in order to relieve any concerns you might have about what’s going to happen to it.
Who I Am
I am the founder of Three:Twenty Interactive, and for the past two years, a great deal of my time has been spent renovating sites to bring out more of their potential. In general, I redesign them to make them more appealing and more functional, and rearchitect them to benefit from greater search engine traffic. You can see a list of the sites that I’ve done here.
Why Did I Buy Unmatched Style?
I’ve been looking for a major site to purchase for several months now. I was even the original high bidder for Blog Herald, but that didn’t work out. So, I kept looking.
When I found UMS, I was immediately interested for two reasons. First, the site looked outstanding. It deserved to be listed in the Gallery itself. Redesigning a site is my least favorite part, so here was a site that was already far better than anything I could design.
Second, the concept fit me perfectly. I have been keeping my own gallery of great design since 1996. I’m not a great designer, so I always had to have plenty of examples close by. This site was an online version of what I had been doing for 10 years.
My Plans for the Site
Very little about the site will change. The design will stay (obviously), as will the purpose of the site. I’m just going to make a few tweaks.
First, my goal is to have at least one review a day. I believe that there are plenty enough sites worthy of being in the Gallery that we won’t ever run out at that rate. I also believe that one a day is a good pace. You get a consistent flow, but it’s not overwhelming.
Second, to help me with those reviews, I’m going to be bringing on board some guest advisors. Each will be accomplished designers in their own right and will bring their unique perspectives to the site. I’ll be announcing those over the coming days.
That’s it (I think). I don’t think you’ll really notice anything else change. If it does, I’ll either update this post or add a new one.
Until then, please let me know what you like most about the site right now, and if there’s anything you’d like to see that isn’t here already. I’m still finalizing everything, so I would love to hear what you think.
Thanks!
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Awesome, I wish you 100% success with this community. And I hope it continues to thrive!
I am really glad you are keeping the theory behind unmatched style. You are right, there are certainly a lot of quality sites out there up for review. I think UMS could benefit from a slight design upgrade, although that is obviously up to you. I know it is a little cheesey - but you could do a design contest (similar to the [decent content] one that has just finished) to try and get people geared up for the future of UMS.
Also - I know you are looking for accomplished designers to review sites, but you could also consider the general web users who maybe can’t design, but know what they like and know what works?!? You could even consider a “contest” for the best 5 writers or critics - they could then become regular feature writers. Afterall, even if someone is a good designer, they may not be able to write a good article.
Anyway, food for thought.
Good luck Shane.
Great suggestions, Chris. I definitely will keep those in mind.
Good luck… Wish you all the best…
Thanks for the intro Shane and all the best :) I really like the one-review-a-day idea.
As an additional idea maybe there could occasionally be theme weeks where reviews are for sites which demonstrate superb usability or great menu’s or different and effective use of a particular color.
Good luck.
One website a day sounds great, although you’ll definitely have to keep up a high standard, but still with a variety. You could try to choose 7 guys with different tastes, and make them post a website per week. This would be fun as there would be a variety along a consistency.
ps. Hopefully you won’t do what the guys at cssvaul and screenspire did. This seems to be a trend.
Oooo, I like that idea, Harmony!
Yeah, Tom, I definitely want to balance frequency with quality. No sense posting every day if the sites aren’t worth being in the Gallery. That’s part of the reason for getting advisors with different backgrounds—hopefully they each bring something different to the table and keep it fresh.
I like Harmony’s theme idea. You could also take that further by adding tags/keywords/categories to the sites as they are reviewed that hilight what that site does particularly well; for example, a site might be tagged: “navigation, green, minimal,” or “ajax, single page, gallery, black”.
Then you could provide users the ability to search the archives based on those tags, so someone looking for ideas for navigation could narrow their search to just the sites that have intersting navigation.
Wow! I’m glad I asked for suggestions! These are fantastic. I definitely need to get to work on the tagging idea. When we start reviewing one site a day, having them categorized would definitely make the Gallery that much more valuable.
Shane,
I’m very curious to see your gallery from 10 years!
Any chance of it being online somewhere?
(or just sending me a link?)
Stachel
I still cant feel you as the owner…
but i wish you a luck and ill still keep visiting….
hoping that you wont ruin the fun of this site.
also:
Copyright © 2004-2006 Unmatched Style
>>A Three:Twenty Interactive Production>> i don think so
Stachel, I wish I still had them! For several years, back in the early days, it was nothing more than a three-ring binder with design elements taped into it. I would cut out things from magazines, things I had printed out, etc.
Sasan, now that UMS is a Three:Twenty production, I can assure you that the site will only get better. I have never had a site where that wasn’t the case. If this ends up being the first, though, I assure you that I will bring in someone who will reverse the trend sooner rather than later.
I think you’ll really like what you find over the next few weeks, though. Stick around and let me know what you think!
Good Luck from Austria too ;)
Already have an uneasy feeling about this… The “friends” links all look like link exchanges as well as most of the UMS Homepage now. All the “friends” list are table-based, money grabber web sites…
Trevor,
First, thank you very much for your comments. I’d much rather let people tell me exactly what they think instead of just going away to never come back.
As for the Friends links, they are indeed friends and/or sites that have allowed me to get to the point where I could buy UMS from Ryan and get it ramped back up (and thus “friends” in a different sense of the word). I know there’s a ongoing debate about whether selling text links is “ethical,” but regardless of which side you fall on, know that I will never sell text links.
And yes, some of the sites are of higher-caliber than others right now (I particularly liked the “table-based” slam :)). That’s why I changed the label of that section to more accurately reflect what those links represented, and also why I moved it from it’s more prominent location in the center column all the way over to the least prominent position on the page.
It’s also much better than what was there before–the Recent Submissions–because anyone could insert anything into that list. We had all sorts of junk popping up because it wasn’t moderated at all. That really harmed the image of the site, in my opinion, because it appeared that we had approved those submissions to be displayed–which wasn’t the case at all.
Finally, there are only three things that have changed about the UMS homepage:
1. The switching of the 2nd and 3rd columns as mentioned above.
2. The addition of a sponsor yesterday who approached me, and I approved, because the product was so highly relevant to UMS visitors and because the advertisement, and the site, were very presentable.
3. The switch from Yahoo Publisher Network for contextual ads to Google AdSense–simply because I don’t have a YPN account.
That’s it. The biggest change is the addition of new reviews. Since last July we’ve only had 32 reviews, and the last two (the ones since we flipped the switch on the new site last Thursday) have outscored all but 4 of the others.
I think we’re well on our way to getting UMS back up to speed. I welcome your continued input and think you’ll like what you find after just a couple of weeks as we have more frequent reviews of better sites.
Thanks again,
Shane
I am not going to tell you how to run UMS :) but I really enjoyed the “recent submissions” I liked to see what people were creating and submitting, some were spam other’s were people’s hard work. That was one of the first things I did when visiting UMS.
The friends section really isn’t relevant to what UMS is/was about when Ryan Latham ran it which is why I get the uneasy feeling about the “friends” section. I don’t think i’ve seen a table-based web site ever being promoted on UM”S”.
Yeah, hopefully now we can get more of those front and center so more people can see them without having to separate the good from the spam. Looking forward to your continued participation!