NomansiteNews / 29 September 2026
The register now has a jury
Everything here is measured. Whether the work is any good is a different question, and no crawler can answer it — so we asked the studios that have already taken a place to answer it instead.
This register was built on one stubborn idea: show what can be observed and refuse to publish what cannot.
We read footers. We count signatures. We compute reach from ratings that exist whether we like them or not.
None of that says whether a website is good.
That question needed someone qualified to answer it, and we were not willing to answer it ourselves.
A seat is earned, not applied for
On the first day of every month the register takes a snapshot: the hundred studios with the highest reach in the world, and the top ten in every country. Those snapshots now do something besides sitting in an archive.
A place in the world top 100 opens the whole register to that studio. It can score any site we have photographed.
A place in the top ten of a country opens the sites built by studios of that country.
A place in a city opens nothing. A city holds too few studios to make a panel, and we would rather have no panel than a thin one.
The panel is taken from the newest snapshot, which means a seat is held, not owned. Lose the place, lose the seat. Take the place, take the seat.
How the scoring works
Sites arrive one at a time, and the ones nobody has scored yet come first.
The juror gives a score from 1 to 10. That is the end of it: one score per site, no editing, no withdrawal.
Two rules make the scoring worth having.
A studio is never shown its own work.
No juror is told who built the site on the screen. The address is there — you cannot look at a website without opening it — but the studio behind it is not named. A panel of ten studios from one country knows itself by name, and scoring with the name in view would be a vote for friends rather than a judgement of work.
What gets published
A site page shows the average of every score it was given, with the number of jurors printed beside it.
Not the sum. A sum would compare luck with the number of voters rather than the work itself.
And never the average alone — one score from one studio is one opinion, and the page says so in the same breath as the number. A site nobody has scored shows nothing at all, because a zero would state something about the work that nobody actually said.
It does not touch the ranking. Yet.
This needs saying plainly, because it would be easy to assume otherwise.
Jury scores do not affect reach, and they do not affect the rankings or the way reach is computed. A studio's place today is what it always was: its own domain rating plus the ratings of the sites we found its signature on. A high score changes nothing about where a studio stands, and neither does a low one.
That will change. The jury is being assembled now, and the scores are being collected now, precisely so that there is something real to build on later — a number that came from studios who know what building a website costs, rather than from a formula that only knows links.
We are not going to announce how that will work before we know. When it changes, it will be written here, and the method page will be rewritten the same day.
Until then: the ranking measures reach, the jury measures judgement, and the two are kept apart on purpose.
The full description of the method is on the Method page. If you hold a place in the newest snapshot, the Jury section is already waiting in your cabinet.