Over the past year I’ve had several sites listed on a variety of CSS galleries. CSS Mania has always provided the most traffic and comments/votes and I thought it would be interesting to chat with the founder, Gabriel Segura. Gabriel was kind enough to answer our questions and the transcript is below.
Allen: Can we start with a brief overview of yourself?
Gabriel: My name is Gabriel Segura. I was born in 1975. I am a telecomunications engineer (working at Ericsson during the day), flash designer, front-end web developer and CSS Mania’s father (at night). Married with a beautiful woman, Susana, and father of a “real” daughter Claudia (3 years old). We also have a Himalayan Persian cat at home called “Yuna” (Final Fantasy X). God gave me a wife that loves to play PS3/Xbox/Wii more than me.
Allen: What is CSS Mania?
Gabriel: We believe that CSS Mania is the largest CSS showcase in the world.
Allen: Why did you start CSS Mania and when did it launch?
Gabriel: CSS Mania was born in March 2004 as a section on my personal blog as I loafed around the few CSS Showcases that existed during that time. In 2005, before our admired Paul Scrivens sold CSSVault to Jacob Gower, we realized that other CSS Showcases sites, except ours, weren’t updating very regularly. We know that updates are what make a difference to readers.
We aren’t interested in the geek insights or trivial discussions common on other similar sites. We are interested in learning what any CSS afficionado or professional might want to learn.
Allen: Of the sites listed on CSS Mania, which are your favorites?
Gabriel: Mostly all the sites having the “favorite ribbon” on top of the screenshots are.
Allen: What tips do you have for getting listed on cssmania and for getting a good score?
Gabriel: We don´t pay a lot of attention to scores. We all know the easy it is to “cheat” any system in terms of voting (cache, proxies) and so is our system. That’s difficult to handle, unless we set user authentification, which is an step backwards. We want CSS Mania to be as easy to access as possible. And we have always wanted that.
Allen: Do you generate revenue from CSS Mania? If so, what methods do you use?
Gabriel: Yes we do. Most of the income goes to pay other of our projects (youare.com is taking big part of it), and the other revenue is used and goes to different NGOs. We generate revenue with banners. All of the bannerswe run should be interesting for our audience (90% designers); so, we will never advertise anything we don´t think might be good for our visitors.
And for the readers out there … “No, we are not selling CSSMania”.
Allen: What types of design trends have changed since you started the service?
Gabriel: Mmmmm, that will need another post. The most amazing thing we’ve seen during the year is nice usage of mootools and javascript and the way they can be integrated in a site making it nice.
Allen: What’s next for CSS Mania?
Gabriel: Next? Next is finishing the day without a DDOS against our site. Next is continuying being the first css showcase out there. We know where we are in the tremendous list of css showcases.
Thanks for taking some time to chat with us Gabriel!
2 Responses
I hadn’t heard of CSSMania before. Thanks for sharing, Allen. I checked it out, and am impressed with what I saw. With around 375 education sites in the list, this should be another good resource for me when trying to look for new things to do with our site.
yea – it’s been around for a long time and when you need design inspiration, it’s a great place to go… interesting on the educational category!