Design directories are great for exposing yourself as a designer, gathering more followers to your design blog, finding clients or just building good quality backlinks.
Either way, there is no reason why you wouldn’t want to get the extra attention.
Most sites offer free submission, but some are paid services. There are also a lot of sites that gives rewards out to the best designs. Here is part 1 of our list of the top 100 web design directory sites.
CSSAwards claims to have the best collection of CSS websites around the world. If you could get a daily feature, then you would surely expose yourself to a large audience.
CSS Design Awards is a free directory which also gives daily features to the best sites. Their big gallery can give you a lot of good ideas in case you have an artist’s block.
aWWWards is a site where one can’t get featured easily. Still, it is worth a shot and could help you make some interesting contacts.
The FWA has been running since 2010 and is a great website that you would like to be featured on. This is not easily though.
NewWebPick is very nice site and offers free registration. Worth the time of registering and submitting your site for sure!
Web Creme tries to be one of the most inspiring CSS galleries on the web. This site can bring you quite some attention too.
Best Web Gallery offers you to submit your site free, without even registering.
UnmatchedStyle is free and has a great blogging community as well. It is a nice site to follow if you are web designer.
The Design Inspiration is a great website that features a lot of categories and other forms of design such as logo design.
CSS Showcase is a site that could use a better design itself, but due to its high traffic and authority you should certainly submit your site over here.
CSS Cake lets your enjoy of slice of e-cake by letting your submit your design free of charge. They have high standards though.
CSS Winner chooses a new features design every day. While submitting is free, there are a lot of details to give out and the standards are quite high.
CSS Heaven is great site with a gallery of many features designs for inspiration. Contact the staff about getting your up there!
Browser Shots is another website that could use better design itself, still, all that link juice and attention could be yours!
CSS Luxury is great project and contains a rich CSS gallery of websites of different themes and colors. Submitting your own website is quite easy.
Divine CSS will make your mouth water!
CSS Daddy is very nice website that even supports Flash based websites and likes to feature only the best.
CSS Elite showcases the best designs and websites around the web. Can you meet their standards?
CSS Drive shows categorized examples of beautiful CSS design.
CSS Hunt is search for the best designs on the Internet. Submit yours easily!
DesignSnack is an online web design gallery that is a nice treat for designers looking for inspiration.
Design Flavr is a site that is updated daily and you should submit your work to their CSS directory.
Design Shack is just what it says – a shack, a shack with great style and taste!
CSS Remix is a great directory to submit your designs to. Don’t expect too much traffic though.
CSS Mania allows you to add site, but listing costs $10. Sometimes it is worth it, other times the only thing you will get out of it is a backlink for SEO purposes.
Site Inspire is a great and elegant directory. You have to register as a member before you start submitting designs.
CSS Beauty is also a community and is great hangout for designers. If you are too busy to join other sites to follow different trends, then don’t worry, all of them come to this site’s showcase eventually.
W3C Websites only accepts sites with validated coding. If you kept your design clean and free of errors, then this is a great place to submit it.
Hotwebber is a showcase of brilliant designs and getting on their top 10 list is a huge honor.
CSS Blast is small site, but could still prove very useful, while submission is easy, it may take some time.
CSS Logia is a sleek and clean gallery that is easy to use and navigate.
Best CSS Gallery – tries to be just what the names says. It is a nice site that even features a voting system for the submitted designs.
Well Done Sites is a web design gallery featuring submitted web 2.0 sites. It is also a community with guides and tutorials.
My3W is another sites that focused around W3C validated websites.
The CSS Catwalk is quite an original site for this common topic. Submission is easy and standards are rather low.
CSS Line is a very popular and respected design gallery. You can submit your site easily, but it is a hard process to get it approved.
CSS Hook is a gallery with web 2.0 standards.
CSS Downunder is a great gallery to submit your site to if you are from Australia.
CSS Depot is a site with a very nice grungy textured design. If your site is something in those lines, then it will probably get accepted.
CSS Dump has been out of date for a while, but getting submitted here will still benefit you.
Nice Stylesheet is fun submission based gallery website.
CSS Galeri is an interesting web design gallery.
CSS Snap is just another best web design gallery.
That concludes the first half our picks for the top website design directory list.
Be sure to check out part 2 below!
And as always, let us know if there are any we may have forgotten or you would like to include in this list!