Today we’re announcing an affiliate program that all Design Shack members can take advantage of. If you run a blog, have a Twitter account, or want to spread the word about our latest deal via email, we’d love for you to help with promoting our weekly deals!

We pay a 15% commission on every sale you generate, and you can keep track of every click and sale you generate in real-time. Read on to find out more!

How It Works

Every Design Shack member has a unique affiliate link (you can find yours here when logged in), which tracks every visitor you send our way:

• Live Statistics: We keep you updated in real-time with any clicks and sales you generate.
• Monthly Payments: Your commission is paid via PayPal at the end of every month.
• Repeat Business: After clicking on your link, you’ll receive commission on all sales that person generates for a full three months!

Dynamic Banners

We’ve prepared a few different banners that you can use on your own site, most of which automatically update to show the latest deal we’re offering each week.

Get Started Now

If you’re already a Design Shack member, you can get started here. If not, it just takes ten seconds to sign up (and you’ll get lots of other goodies at the same time!) – become a member.

If you’d rather not receive community news updates, simply head over to our feeds page and subscribe to the ‘Articles Only’ RSS feed. I hope that you’ll find the new content useful, and am looking forward to keeping your RSS reader updated with daily inspiration!

Design Shack launched proudly in 2003 and has been gradually growing and expanding ever since. Over the past 6 years the site has gained a fantastic readership, I’ve had the chance to meet some great people, and certainly hope that you’ve been a little inspired by the articles and designs we’ve featured.

2009 marks the start of a refresh for Design Shack, and I’m incredibly excited about what the year has in store. The previous site design has been in place for a couple of years and, whilst I was thoroughly pleased with it at the time, I felt that a shift towards a more professional style was required.

Design Changes

The most immediate change is the move to a much simpler, typography based design. Emphasis has shifted away from being purely a CSS Gallery to offering more in the way of community news and regular articles. I hope this will give Design Shack a more rounded appeal, whilst still keeping our original goal of adding two new inspiring website designs every day.

After (literally) years of pestering, we’ve moved the thumbnail system to show the full screenshot of a site rather than a cropped version – sorry it took so long! The gallery retains the familiar “Browse by colour / layout style” options, along with new pagination styling to make skipping through multiple designs much quicker.

There are still a few niggles in Internet Explorer 7, which will be iron out over the next day or two. IE6 support is a non-starter, so to the 2% of readers currently using the older browser, please upgrade!

Onboard the WordPress Ship

Previous versions of Design Shack began with a completely customized CSS Gallery system, moving in the previous version to incorporate a heavily customized copy of TextPattern. Having used WordPress in countless design projects for others, I felt it made sense to move Design Shack across to a more expandable and reliable system.

The CSS Gallery system still runs completely independently, but all the community news and articles are handled through WordPress. It’s been a breeze to set up, and will make adding new writers to the site a far simpler process.

Looking for Contributors

With all the ambitious changes taking place, we’re looking for people who are interested in writing articles for the site, along with helping to add community news on a regular basis. If you’d like to help out, please drop me an email – I’d love to hear from you.

I hope you like the new design, and welcome your thoughts and comments on what you’d like to see on Design Shack in 2009!

Follow us on Twitter

We are also likely to use this method to notify you of competitions, updates and new features to the site – so make sure you don’t miss out and become a follower.

See you there!

After hearing what you had to say, a few minor design and functionality changes to the site have been made. From the annoying fact you had to click twice to get to a featured site, to the scroll bar in the middle of our homepage – we’ve listened. Here are some of the changes that have been made today:

1. We have placed more visual emphasis on news and tutorials
2. Designs are now updated twice daily
3. We are increasing our regular CSS gallery updates to 4 per day
4. We are aiming to post more regular news and tutorials – so you can get your inspiration and news all in one place
5. You can now search by colour or layout from the top of the homepage
6. We are accepting reader submitted news articles
7. Only one click is required to get to a featured website
8. … and quite a few more random improvements!

We hope that some of your niggles have been fixed and you’ll enjoy Design Shack even more!

Please feel free to let us know your thoughts on the new service, we always appreciate feedback.

You now search by how you would like to be inspired – by Colour, Layout or Category. This opens up a new realm of functionality for CSS gallery websites and enhances navigation greatly. It’s much easier to submit your website to us, and navigating around is a breeze. Designs load faster and are much more optimised than before.

We hope you enjoy it, and feel free to send us your feedback!

Thank you to all those who keep contributing their fantastic websites, and we hope to keep serving you great CSS, XHTML, Javascript, layouts, content and design far into the future.