About Websitely
Websitely is a reference library of business websites that were actually designed, organised by trade, with the decisions behind each one written out.
Why it exists
If you own a roofing company and you want a better website, the first thing you do is look at other roofing companies. You find forty sites that came out of the same template, pick the least bad one, and hand it to a developer as the brief. Three months later you have paid for the forty-first copy.
This site exists to put better references in front of that decision. Every gallery here collects the sites in one trade that someone genuinely designed, and every entry says what the design actually is: the display typeface and the size it is set at, the body face, the palette in hex, the grid, the container width, the platform, and how the page asks for the work. You can take a decision from it without copying a pixel.
How sites get in
Candidates come from everywhere except search rankings. Trade directories, award lists, design studio client lists, city by city searching, and a lot of clicking through. Each shortlist runs to around thirty sites for every page that gets published, and usually between ten and sixteen survive.
What a site needs to survive is evidence of a decision. A deliberate palette, type doing real work, photography that belongs to the company, a page that knows what it wants the visitor to do. Being well known is not a qualification, and several large firms were left out for the plain reason that their site came out of the same template as everyone else's. Where a site is only competent, the write up says so.
What gets written about each one
Every entry is looked at by a person at full size. The typefaces and sizes are measured from the live page, then checked against what is on screen, because measurement alone gets fonts wrong often enough to matter. The palette is taken by how much of the screen each colour actually occupies, not by what the brand guidelines claim. The notes under each screenshot cover type, colour, layout and the call to action, and then say plainly what the site got right and what it cost.
Who writes it
Editorial selection and the write ups are by Larry W. Matthews. The site is published by Usman Yahya.
What we will not do
No site has ever paid to be included and none ever will. There is no sponsored placement, no paid review, and no arrangement where an agency buys its client a spot. If that ever changes it will be labelled on the page itself.
Websitely does carry advertising, and some links to website builders and hosting companies are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you buy through them. That revenue has no bearing on which sites are selected or what the write ups say. Advertising is always visually separate from editorial.
Corrections, takedowns and suggestions
Screenshots are published as commentary and criticism, each one credited to the company by name and linked to the live site. If you own a site here and want the screenshot removed, write to us and it will be taken down, no argument. If something in a write up is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed with a note. If you know a site that belongs here, send it. The contact page reaches us.