g4llery

What it is

Most good websites get shared once and then quietly disappear. g4llery is meant to be somewhere a site can sit, get looked at and stick around. You do not need a portfolio, a following or a pitch. You just need a site you are glad you made.

I wanted it to feel like a friendly corner of the internet, not a museum, and not an agency award site.

Walkthrough

1. Land on the front pageA big headline, one sentence about the idea, and a featured spot. Until the first site is posted, that spot says so, and invites whoever posts first to take the whole thing.
2. Make an accountAn email and a password. It does not ask what company you work for or how you heard about it.
3. Add your siteDrop in a screenshot or two, give it a name, and write a sentence about what it is, the way you would tell a friend.
4. A person takes a lookSomeone checks that it is a real site and not spam. That should take a few hours, and then it is up.
5. Pick a planFree is genuinely free: one website, up to three screenshots, a short description and optional comments. Premium is 50 dollars a month for studios and people shipping more than one thing: up to five sites, real clickable links out, a place in the front page rotation and numbers on how it is doing.
6. Take it down any timeIt is your work. You decide how long it stays up, no questions asked.

Design decisions

• The name is always lowercase, with the numeral four in the second spot. It makes the brand feel internet-native, and it earns the casual voice.
• The wording changed on purpose. An earlier version talked like a museum, with exhibitions and curators. This one talks like a place: posted, up, showing, spot, front page.
• Lime on near-black, set in Clash Display and Supreme, with large friendly headlines and short answers.
• The pricing page promises that you never hit a wall where the free version stops working. Paid just gets you more room and better placement.

What exists and what is planned

Designed: the homepage you can look at above, plus a creative-experiments page and a detail page for a single posted site, with a full design document that sets the rules for all of them.

Planned, not built: the working product. I wrote the back end up as a step-by-step build guide: Next.js on Vercel, Supabase for the database, sign-in and image storage, and Stripe Billing for the subscription.

Decisions in the build guide

• The limit of one free site and five premium sites is enforced in the database, not in the page, so nobody can get around it by skipping the interface.
• Whether someone is a premium member is only ever written by the payment provider's webhook. The browser can never claim it.
• It uses ordinary subscription billing with a customer portal, because nothing here pays money out to third parties.