Oh That's Nice is a curated directory of beautiful websites, built with Jekyll and hosted on Netlify, that documents exemplary web design through automated screenshots and community submissions.
What is Oh That's Nice?
Oh That's Nice is an open-source showcase of beautiful websites. It takes website URLs submitted by the community, generates a screenshot of each site programmatically using the webshot tool, and publishes them in a Jekyll-built gallery on Netlify. Screenshots are stored on Amazon S3. The project is curated by Joe Grainger (@jjgrainger) and serves as both a design inspiration gallery and an experimental playground for automated build and deployment workflows.
Key Features
- Curated gallery — Not every submission is accepted; maintainers review all entries and reserve the right to reject any site to keep quality high.
- Built with Jekyll — The entire showcase is generated by the static site generator Jekyll, making the codebase approachable for developers.
- Hosted on Netlify — The site is continuously deployed on Netlify, which handles builds and hosting.
- Automated screenshots — Website screenshots are generated programmatically with webshot and hosted on Amazon S3, so no image files are committed to the repository.
- GitHub-based submissions — Anyone can submit a site by creating a GitHub issue with the label
requestand the site URL, or by forking the repo and opening a pull request. - Rake task for new posts — The project includes a
rake newcommand that runs an interactive prompt to scaffold a new showcase post, then the user can modify it before submitting a PR. - RSS feed — Visitors can subscribe via FeedBurner RSS at
http://feeds.feedburner.com/OhThatsNiceWebto get updates on newly added sites. - Open source — The full source code is available on GitHub, letting others study or reuse the automated workflow.
Who is it for?
- Web designers — Browse a hand-picked collection of beautiful sites to find design inspiration for their own projects.
- Developers — Explore the Jekyll codebase and Netlify deployment setup to learn how a static gallery with automated screenshot generation can be built.
- Site owners — Submit their own websites via GitHub to get a professionally generated screenshot and a spot in the showcase, provided the design meets the curator's quality bar.
- Automation enthusiasts — Follow the project to see how build, deploy, screenshot, and submission generation are automated in real time.
What can you do with Oh That's Nice?
- Seek design inspiration: Scroll through the curated list of beautiful websites to collect ideas for layouts, color schemes, typography, and interactions.
- Submit a site for showcase: Go to the GitHub repository, open a new issue with a title that starts with "Add" followed by the site's name and the full URL in the comments, and label it
request. Or follow the pull-request workflow usingrake new. - Study a Jekyll + Netlify setup: Read the source to understand how the site uses Jekyll for content generation, Netlify for hosting, webshot for screenshots, and Amazon S3 for image storage.
How does Oh That's Nice work?
Submissions are handled entirely through GitHub. The simplest path is to create an issue with the site name as the title, the full URL in the comments, and the request label. For maintainers, the pull-request workflow involves cloning the repository, running bundle install, executing rake new to generate a new post, editing it, and opening a PR. Screenshots are not committed to the repo; a maintainer generates them automatically with webshot and uploads them to S3.
FAQ
How do I submit a website to Oh That's Nice?
Create a GitHub issue in the repository with a title like "Add" plus the website name, paste the full site URL in the comments, and add the request label. Alternatively, fork the repo, run bundle install and rake new, fill in the prompts, and open a pull request.
Does Oh That's Nice accept every submission?
No. The maintainers explicitly state that they try to keep submissions high quality and reserve the right to reject any submission. Not all websites are added to the showcase.
Is Oh That's Nice free?
The project is open source and the showcase is freely accessible. There is no paid tier or pricing mentioned anywhere in the repository or site.
Who runs Oh That's Nice?
The project is built and curated by Joe Grainger. You can find him at jjgrainger.co.uk and on Twitter as @jjgrainger. The project is also followed on its own Twitter account, @OhThatsNice_.
Can I contribute code to the project?
Yes. The repository is on GitHub and welcomes pull requests. Contributors should follow the submission workflow and avoid committing screenshots, as those are generated automatically.
