Building a one-page website gallery into an 18-year business

Building a one-page website gallery into an 18-year business

Rob Hope started One Page Love, a gallery that selects and introduces websites built as a single page, in March 2008. The small design gallery grew into his full-time business, and in July 2026 it was sold to Some Studio. Announcing the sale, the figure he offered was 18 years of running it and 9,061 one-page websites.

Starting from a reference collection to show clients

Hope, a web designer and developer from South Africa, spent about ten years as a freelancer building websites for clients. The problem he ran into while working was that clients described the design they wanted with abstract adjectives. He began collecting real websites to show clients, and this gathering of reference material became the starting point of One Page Love. In the process of solving a communication difficulty he kept running into, a reference library that other designers could also use came into being.

He narrowed the scope to one-page websites. The target was sites that place core content such as an introduction, services, and customer testimonials in a single screen flow, so visitors can understand everything by scrolling. In a public discussion in 2019 as well, Hope did not claim this format suits every website, and explained that his interest lay in clearly delivering a message with an appropriate amount of text and images. It was an attitude of choosing a specialty while not treating that format as the right answer for every situation.

Each entry in the gallery came with a screenshot and a short note pointing out the design's characteristics. The page's purpose, visual style, features, typeface, and colors were also classified so similar examples could be found. For example, in the Wifeel page introduced in 2014, he mentioned a distinctive layout, a full-screen loading indicator, and a download button that splits into two on hover. Visitors could browse the finished screens and also grasp which specific expressions to reference.

This kind of record kept some of its value even after the original website changed. In Wifeel's case, after the original was redesigned or disappeared he removed the direct link, but kept the screenshot and write-up from that time and provided a link to the Internet Archive. This case shows why preserving screens and recording context matters in running a design gallery long-term. Even after a link expires, room remains to use it as reference material.

From side project to full-time work

It did not cover all his living costs right after he started One Page Love. According to Hope's project record, Hit Delete, the freelance practice he ran, operated from 2006 to 2016 and closed as he devoted himself to One Page Love. That means about eight years passed from its launch to the switch to full-time work. In a 2021 interview he recalled that turning down good contract work in order to spend time on a low-earning personal project was emotionally hard.

Even after going full-time, the core work was finding and introducing new examples. In March 2019 he said he added about one or two websites a day. In the same discussion he placed importance on the experience of quickly scanning many screens by following tags and categories. Growing the amount of material and refining how readers browsed it moved forward together.

The operator's day involved considerable labor. In the 2021 interview Hope explained that he spent about ten hours a day on screen work such as curating content, answering emails, tweaking the site, and designing ideas, and this covered several projects at the time. At the same time he valued the freedom to stop work and go surfing when a good swell came. The independence he sought included not just the amount of work but the authority to decide his own hours and location.

Connecting the gallery's readers to revenue

A newsletter served as a way to keep in touch with readers. Hope wrote that in August 2023 he set a promise to send it every week and kept it for 27 weeks straight. The changes he reported included growth in sponsor revenue, growth in One Page Love's site submissions and monthly recurring revenue, and expanded exchanges with the community. He explained that keeping up the regular publishing also led him to build a better operating system.

The important part of this record is that the publishing schedule he made public was tied to business results. Hope revealed that he tends to overthink and delay shipping when working alone, and that committing to others in this way helps him. The weekly newsletter worked as a deadline for organizing and sending out the curated material, and as a schedule for meeting readers again. This piece, however, gives no specific amount for the revenue growth and no figure separating the newsletter's contribution on its own.

The advertising business's target was relatively clear. As of September 2026, after the sale, the sponsor guide describes designers building clients' websites, founders preparing landing pages, and developers looking for implementation examples as the main readers. The site size the operator disclosed is more than one million annual unique visitors. With this reader mix, the basis of the advertising pitch is that a web-production-related product can be shown to people who would realistically consider it.

The ad placements currently sold include gallery cards, the page-components library, the newsletter, and the areas around articles. The guidance says one sponsor at a time is taken per placement on a monthly basis, and sponsored content is clearly labeled. The policy is not to accept products with low relevance to readers, and not to use external ad scripts or tracking pixels. This is the currently published way of operating, and there is no basis to claim the same terms applied throughout Hope's tenure.

Hope also organized the observations he accumulated running the gallery into educational products. 100 Landing Page Hot Tips was offered free by email over 100 days while also being sold as an ebook, a Notion document, an audiobook, and a checklist. The setup lets readers choose whether to receive the same knowledge in sequence or to buy the compiled material and use it however they like. He stated that this tip series led to an ebook and then to several workshops and talks abroad.

The educational products later expanded into video courses. In December 2024 Hope released Show Them, a course on improving landing pages, to early purchasers, and at the time 22 main videos and additional lessons were prepared. It systematized the experience of finding and featuring good websites so people could use it to improve their own pages. The ebook and course are related businesses of Hope's, so their results should not all be added together as revenue of the One Page Love gallery.

Failures during expansion and winding down projects

Running it for a long time did not mean every decision was a success. The failures covered in a 2024 Webflail interview included over-concentrating on a single revenue source for One Page Love and hiring full-time staff at the wrong time. They show that even in a small online business, overreliance on one revenue source and the decision about staffing costs are issues to manage separately. From the published interview summary alone, the size of the loss from those choices and the details behind them cannot be confirmed.

He applied the way of operating learned from One Page Love to other areas as well. Email Love, started in 2019, was a reference library for discovering email designs, HTML templates, and newsletters. In 2023, ahead of his son's birth, he decided to reduce the number of projects to secure offline time and sold Email Love to Andrew King. This experience shows that Hope has chosen both to create new businesses and to let go of existing ones.

A business passed to the next curator

The sale of One Page Love was announced in an official post by Hope on July 31, 2026. The buyer was Some Studio, led by Piet Terheyden, and the announcement stated that the deal took place that July. Hope emphasized that Terheyden had experience growing Minimal Gallery for a long time before selling it, and that he continues to run the design publication Minimalissimo. Trust in the curation career of the person who would carry the site forward was at the center of the announcement.

The published announcement did not include the deal amount, payment terms, or revenue or profit figures. So the result that can be confirmed in this case goes only as far as the fact that a long-run gallery became a full-time business and was later acquired by another operator. No material is given to calculate a specific scale of wealth created or a sale multiple against revenue.

After the sale Hope chose a new way of working. On August 16, 2026, he announced that he was ending about 20 years of independent work and joining Framer full-time. The explanation was that, at the point One Page Love found a new owner, he was starting a new phase of creating and building products together with a team. The buyer of One Page Love is Some Studio, and Framer is the company he joined after the sale.

Following One Page Love's path makes the work of composing a curation business concrete. The tasks repeated: defining a scope, selecting examples, attaching descriptions and categories, and regularly delivering them to readers. The audience formed in that process became the base of the sponsor business, and the operator's knowledge developed into separate educational products. Hope's case is one path of an independent business that grew a small specialty library into his own job, handed it to the next operator, then moved on to other work.