Just a quick post to let you know about a brief interview that I did over at Lovely Blogs, a gallery site focusing on..er…lovely blogs.

Lovely Blogs was kind enough to showcase Renegade Zen recently, so when they asked if I wanted to do an interview I said “You betcha”. If you’re at all interested in what I’ve got to say about blogging or the design process in general, check out the interview.

As an aside, I think Lovely Blogs is a great example of how gallery sites will have to adapt to cope with the increasingly crowded market place. There’s simply so many CSS and other gallery sites around just now, that making yourself stand out from the crowd takes a bit of thinking.

Lovely Blogs does two things that I think achieve this:

• It focuses on a niche. Rather than just showcase pretty websites it concentrates on one area, therefore positioning themselves as the expert in that field. This is something that E-commerce websites have been doing for ages. It’s going to be difficult to set up the next Amazon, but you can still compete by selling products in your particular field of expertise. Other good focused gallery examples are The Horizonal Way, Light on Dark and CSS Princess.

• It provides “added value” content. This is the biggest factor that I see for the future of gallery webites. By providing news, articles, forums, interviews, tutorials or whatever you’re giving your visitors more reasons to come back to your site and choose it over the million or so competitors. Stylegala updates its gallery section about once a month but it still pulls in hefty traffic from its public news and forum sections.