Interview with Alex Giron the creator of CSSBeauty

Interviews about - Website design and development

The Interviewer: Kat Ortland - seomoz.org

CSSBeauty serves as social community, showcase and news hub for CSS devlopers

What inspired you to create CSS Beauty?Creating a community based website had always been on my mind, I have been fan for a while of sites like Australian InFront, Design is kinky, Pixelsurgeon, News Today, Computerlove. They are all part of the online "design community" so to speak. They are great resources for design but not so much for web standards / web development technologies... Once I discovered the world of "CSS Design" I was hooked, sites like csszengarden, cssvault, alistapart, all demonstrated what could be accomplished with CSS/XHTML and great design... That and the idea of separating content from presentation made total sense and inspired me to create CSS Beauty.
How long did it take you, from start to finish, to get CSS Beauty off the ground? When did you launch?Creating the first version of CSS Beauty took about 1 week, between photoshop mockups, and me learning CSS. The site officially launched on May 17th, 2004.
How did you get funding for the project?It was basically a pet project... lots of sleepless nights.
How do you sustain the usage costs of CSS Beauty?The site was never meant to make any money... That's probably one of the reasons it has survived this long, since "money" has never been the priority, rather the quality of the content. The site does however take advantage of text ads (google, yahoo).
What programming languages & technologies does CSS Beauty use?CSS Beauty utilizes open source PHP, XHTML 1.0 Transitional, CSS and some JavaScript here and there. All managed by the wonderful MovableType CMS.
How big is your development team? Anything special you'd like to say about them?All development is done by me with the exception of some custom PHP apps that were built by my good friend Michael Raichelson.
How many people do you estimate currently use CSS Beauty?The site receives an average of 7,000 unique visitors and around 26,000 page views a day.
What is your opinion about the Web 2.0 phenomenon? How do you see CSS Beauty fitting into it?I think Zeldman sums it up nicely in this article http://www.alistapart.com/articles/web3point0
How does CSS Beauty fit in this madness? I'm not sure it does, we try to inform our visitors on the latest happenings in the world of CSS/JavaScript/HTML development with a focus on Web Standards, whether or not that's considered web2.0, I'm not sure.
What are your plans for the future of CSS Beauty?CSS Beauty will continue to grow strongly, just in the past few months we've added 2 important features, the forums, and a job section which have been well received by the community. Later this year we plan to launch a few more features. The whole "Web Standards" movement is still in my eyes very young and has a lot more room to grow... as long as that is the case, CSS Beauty will be there to showcase and inform it's visitors.
Do you have advice or insights for other people who are trying to create projects in a similar vein?I think the most important factor is to believe in what you are selling... be passionate about it, enjoy it, and keep up to date.