5 sites to promote your open source design
If you design open source templates, of course you want them to be downloaded and used by other people. You can just upload them to your own site but in most cases they won’t be downloaded a lot of times. Probably the site is not so popular. There are some exclusions like Andreas Viklund’s site but not a lot of them.
One more way is to upload your template to special sites for such things. Let’s see what sites are that.
1. Open Web Design. The site has a very good community which always ready to give some comments in the forum. If you upload your template there it won’t be showed on the site immediately. Standing in the queue usually takes about 3-4 weeks. That’s because they give templates a chance to be on the main page for some time. So be patient and wait. OWD can generate a lot of traffic and downloads if the template is good. There is also an images size restriction. They shouldn’t be more than 25kb in sum. (p.s. Looks like that changed a tradition with a long waiting at the queue at the last week. Probably that’s just for once but who knows…)
2. Free Layouts.com. This site doesn’t have such community like OWD, but it usually generates much more downloads and site visits. The queue usually takes 2-5 days. In contrast to OWD it hasn’t any size limits.
3. Free Web Templates. Do you like when a site have a lot of advertisements? If you hate that than you shouldn’t upload your templates there. That’s because you’ll see a lot of advertisements at its main page. If advertisements is okay for you than you can get some downloads from there. An amount of them probably would be somewhere between OWD and Free Layouts. This service doesn’t have any restrictions and templates stay in the queue for about a week.
4. Zeroweb.org. Advertisements, quite stupid UI and even less downloads than OWD don’t make this site very good. At the same moment, promotion is promotion so if you need it, you’d upload your templates even there.
5. Open Source Web Design. I think it was one of the first such services and very popular some time ago. At the moment it doesn’t takes new templates but probably will do that again. I heard that OWD was made by one of OSWD admins.
I think there are some others such sites. For example - 4LAYOUTS.COM. The site is very strange. Looks like you can’t upload templates there by yourself and it takes them from Free Web Templates by itself. That of course generates some trafic but not a lot of it. You also can upload screenshots of your templates to special section of deviantArt. But my experiments show me that that won’t give you a lot of traffic.
If somebody knows some more such services or promoting ways I will really glad to hear them from you. They also would be added to the article with proper credits.
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