Volume XVII · 2025 Edition · About & Process
About the Directory — and the people who keep it honest.
Eighteen years on, ListOfWebsites is still the internet's most rigorously curated address book: 52,840 verified sites across 487 categories, hand-checked by a team of 14 in Portland, Oregon.
Origin Story · Chapter I
Why we started ListOfWebsites in a Portland coffee shop.
In the winter of 2008, our founder David Renwick — then a reference librarian at the Multnomah County Library — kept losing hours of research to dead links, parked domains, and SEO-spun directories that had stopped being maintained the moment their ad networks were wired up. He started keeping a spreadsheet of sites that actually answered the question he had typed.
By March 2009, that spreadsheet had 200 hand-picked links. He registered the domain two years earlier (March 14, 2007) on the advice of a regular at the coffee bar on Hawthorne — "buy the name before someone else does, and figure out what it is later." The first 200 entries were typed in by hand from a corner stool at Public Domain, two blocks from our current office on Stark Street.
What began as a librarian's fix for a librarian's problem has, sixteen years later, become the largest hand-curated directory of the modern web — but the rule has not changed: no listing goes live until a human has opened it, read it, and decided it is worth your click.
The Team · Chapter II
14 curators, 60 specialists, one shared checklist.
A working portrait of the team that hand-verifies every entry on the directory — and what a curator's week actually looks like at ListOfWebsites.
Our editorial staff in Portland comprises fourteen curators, editors, and engineers, supported by a network of more than sixty category specialists — subject-matter contributors who vet everything from open-source geology tools to vintage synthesizer manuals. There is no algorithm deciding what makes the cut. Every submission, every re-check, every "Site of the Day" is read by a person whose name is on the byline.
A typical week for a curator begins in the submissions inbox: roughly two hundred new URLs arrive each week from readers and submitters, of which perhaps a third pass our first-pass sniff test. Those that do are queued for the 27-point quality check, where a second curator loads the page on a throttled connection, verifies ownership through WHOIS and certificate records, and writes a one-paragraph editorial note describing what the site actually does. Approved entries are then scheduled into the daily publishing slot, where a third editor assigns categories, tags, and rank.
Meanwhile, the audit desk works the re-verification queue. Every active listing is re-tested on an 18-month cycle, and the entire directory was re-passed in a single 14-month audit completed in Q2 2024 — the kind of project that retires 11,200 stale entries and re-confirms the rest. If a specialist disagrees with a curator, the disagreement is escalated to the editorial board, which meets every Friday at 11 a.m. Pacific. Disputes are recorded in our public log.
We are a deliberately small team. We publish between six and twelve new entries per day, five days a week, and one "Site of the Day" editorial feature every weekday morning — over 5,800 since launch. We do not run sponsored listings, we do not accept payment for placement, and our curators are not paid by the entry. Slow on purpose, by design.
By the Numbers · Chapter III
The directory, in four numbers.
- 52,840 verified websites indexed across 487 categories, as of 2025.
- 487 curated categories — from mainstream News and Shopping to Vintage Synth Manuals and Open-Source Geology Tools.
- 380,000+ monthly unique readers, averaging a 4.2-minute session — the longest of any directory in our category.
- 11,200 entries retired in the Q2 2024 audit, the largest single re-verification project in our eighteen-year history.
The Process · Chapter IV
How a website earns its listing: the 27-point check.
Every entry in ListOfWebsites — whether submitted by a reader or sourced by a curator — passes the same twenty-seven-point quality review before it can be published. The seven headline criteria, by chapter:
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I.
HTTPS & Certificate Integrity
The site must serve a valid TLS certificate from a recognised authority, with no mixed-content warnings on the landing page. We check the certificate chain, expiry window (must exceed ninety days), and the issuing authority against a deny-list of mis-issuers.
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II.
Load Time on a Throttled Connection
Pages must reach interactive in under four seconds on a simulated 3G connection from a fresh browser profile. Sites that meet the threshold on broadband but stall on mobile are flagged for a second pass.
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III.
Content Depth & Originality
The site must contain substantive original content — not a thin affiliate shell, not an auto-aggregator, not a doorway page. We require at least three pages of substantive editorial content written or curated by a named human author.
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IV.
Ownership Verification
WHOIS records, certificate registration, and a public "about" page must all point to a verifiable owner. Anonymous registrations are not disqualifying on their own, but the site's content must then make its provenance unambiguous.
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V.
Mobile Rendering
The page must render without horizontal scroll on a 360-pixel viewport. We test on stock Android Chrome and Safari iOS at the two most common OS versions. Fixed-pixel layouts are sent back for revision, not auto-failed.
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VI.
No Malicious Ads or Deceptive Patterns
Pages must not deploy forced-download dialogs, fake "you have won" overlays, hidden unsubscribe flows, or notification-permission traps. Ad density is capped at twenty percent of above-the-fold pixels.
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VII.
Editorial Note by a Curator
Every accepted entry receives a one-paragraph editorial description written by a named curator. The note must describe what the site actually does, not what it claims to do. Listings without an editorial note are held in the queue indefinitely.
The remaining twenty points — including metadata hygiene, accessibility landmarks, archive-snapshot presence, and category-fit review — are recorded in our internal style guide. Each criterion is revisited every January and amended by the editorial board.
"There is no algorithm that can tell you whether a website is worth a reader's time. There is only a person opening the page, reading what is there, and deciding. We have done it that way since the first two hundred entries were typed into a spreadsheet in 2009, and we will keep doing it that way until somebody proves me wrong."