This is only one man’s experience, but I hope there is value for other designers in this information. One clarification – I’m not going to badmouth anyone. Just like the designers reading this post, the value of a site is not measured by traffic alone. I’m not going to mention sites who accepted my work and didn’t generate significant traffic. I want to keep this all positive.

This is what worked for me.

First off, something obvious. Getting “site of the day” will get you exponentially more traffic than just getting accepted. I mention this because the difference for me was a 100x spike in pageviews in one day. I was shocked at how much more traffic it garnered. When submitting your site I would start of looking at sites that have sites of the day/week/month competitions and make sure that you submit to them first. Most sites show so much work with no real focus and the ones who do more obvious curation have the greatest upside. Awwwwards.com has been the highest contributor of traffic to my site since launch and to this day is still my top referrer. The number two referrer has been thebestdesigns.com, where I was also site of the day.

Secondly, look for sites that don’t feature too much work at once. The WordPress.org showcase is a great example of this and is the number three referrer to my site. They sometimes only post one site a day, and have been known not to post for days at a time. Again, it’s harder to get chosen, but if you do there is a lot more focus on your work.

Creattica.com, cssmania.com, webdesignledger.com and csswinner.com round out my top seven referrers. Then something interesting happens – Google. Although this post is about traffic from design websites, never forget how important content and SEO optimization is.

Cssdesignawards.com, cssbased.com and designfridge.co.uk round out my top eleven. Facebook comes in at number twelve, which is interesting because I have almost 4x the number of Twitter followers as Facebook friends (more on this in a later blog post). Designdelight.net and cssawards.net round out my top fourteen sites.

Why top fourteen you ask? After 14 the amount of traffic these sites generate for me drops off drastically and becomes insignificant. These are the sites that contributed material traffic to my website. On an average day my pageviews are up 500% from my previous design with fewer pages.

The remaining question you may have – do mass site submission services work? In my opinion, no. They may carpet bomb your site to dozens or hundreds of design websites but most of those sites only generate only a handful of hits. Again, traffic is only one measure of success, but for me submitting my work to websites that curate by giving awards or by featuring a limited numbers of designs ended up maximizing new traffic to my website.

Today I was awarded the Robert M Montgomery Outstanding Young Alumnus Award from Illinois Wesleyan University. I was presented the award at the annual alumni lunch at the Shirk Center on the IWU campus. The other award winners and I were also announced at halftime at the Titan homecoming football game with the rest of the homecoming court. Yesterday I taught the “Back to School” class “Connecting Fans with Bands” where I outlined my progression from IWU student to VP at Atlantic and how we use design and technology to promote our artists. Overall, it was an amazing experience and I’m extremely honored to be recognized from a university that has given me so much.

Read more about the events on WJBC.com.

The new AtlanticRecords.com website has been getting a lot of press since it first launched early this year and now has been nominated for or won a few major awards. Last week the site won 3 WC3 Awards including Best in Show for Music Websites, and two awards for Community and Navigation.

Gold: Website – Website Features – Structure and Navigation

Best in Show: Website – General Website Categories – Music

Gold: Website – General Website Categories – Community

The site was also nominated for redesign of the year by .Net Magazine.

Check out the .Net Magazine entry here.

Special thanks to our partners at Code and Theory as well as everyone at Atlantic who put long hours and continue to make this site the best label website on the internet.

Below is the booth where David Brown from Agencynet and I answered questions about our award nominated mobile application, Fanbase Mobile, for the conference attendees prior to final voting.

Here is a video Adobe put together to showcase our application.

Fanbase Mobile MAX Booth

While we’ve been working on a prototype of Fanbase for connected TVs with developer Rhett Woods for a few months now, this was the first time I got to see the app running on a device. This is on a Vizio TV running Stagecraft, Adobe’s Flash Lite implementation for the digital home. Right now connected home products are pretty hard to come by, so it was really exciting to see a working demo of our app.

Fanbase TV

Fanbase TV Video

I was also able to see the QNX connected car for the first time. This is another partner (along with Alcatel-Lucent) and I built this version of Fanbase for a custom implementation of Flash Lite 3.1 they have running in the car. I had seen it in emulators and on demo boxes, but there is no comparison to see the app running on a 4G network in the car.

QNX Car

Fanbase Car

Fanbase Car Video

Check out our nomination here.

NARM is a not-for-profit trade association that serves the music content delivery community in a variety of areas including networking, advocacy, information, education and promotion.

And here it is!

Visit the Webby Awards page.

See the list of startups.

Check out Fanbase.