15 Personal Web Designs in WordPress for Inspiration

Your website is more important than you might think—it’s where you’ll showcase your work, describe who you are and what you do, write about your topics of interest, and so on, so you have to make sure your visitors will like it. Remember it’s the first image people will take of you when they are looking for you on the Internet. Therefore, it needs to be more original and reflect who you are. That’s why it’s so difficult to design a beautiful and accessible site.  In general, personal websites can have quite different designs depending on the objectives they seek:

• Curriculum: website whose main objective is to introduce yourself to get a job,
• Personal brand: to become better known or famous and thus gain more opportunities,
• Portfolio: website where you want to showcase your incredible work,
• Blog: to share with others your passions and, in some cases, to have income through advertising, and
• E-commerce: the main purpose is purely commercial by selling your products, works, etc.

Actually, a single site can try to fulfill more than one goal at a time, which means the final designs we see are varied and incorporate very different elements in their design. Today I’d like to share with you 15 personal web designs (based on WordPress, of course) that I think might inspire you.

Let’s start with a very good example of a personal website whose main objective is to share a subject of study or interest and, at the same time, increase the reputation of its author:

# 1 Enrique Dans

Enrique Dans, Professor of Innovation at IE Business School since 1990, maintains one of the most reputable personal blogs on innovation in the startup world. According to him, its goal is:

It’s a purely personal page, written only by me, and which I use fundamentally for two things: to maintain an orderly repository of all my activity and to receive valuable and permanent feedback on topics which, in many cases, I end up later incorporating into my lectures, conferences, or press articles. (Enrique Dans, source: https://www.enriquedans.com/acercade)

His website was designed by Blogestudio. What I like the most about it is its absolute sobriety and simplicity, clearly in line with the expected image of a professor of IE Business School. And of course without any kind of advertising that would disturb the reading of the articles. The main page is the blog itself and, as a result, the quality of the content of its articles is outstanding.

If the objective of your personal website and the image you want to give are similar to those of Enrique, keep things simple and focus on high-quality content. But if you’re looking for something more ground-breaking and need an original design on your website to showcase your innovative and artistic side, here’s a selection of personal WordPress websites that I think will inspire you. They are all unconventional and, in many of them, there’s a lot of design work behind them. So, here we go:

#2 Phil Casabon

Phil Casabon is a great expert with recognized prestige in Freeskiing, a specific type of alpine skiing that involves tricks, jumps, and terrain park features such as rails, boxes, jibs, or other obstacles. This form of skiing resulted from the growth of snowboarding combined with the progression of freestyle skiing

His website has been developed by Pier-Luc Cossette, a designer from Quebec. The web design perfectly conveys that freeskiing is exciting and the love of Phil Casabon for this sport. As noted on his own website:

#3 Coraline Colasse

Coraline Colasse is a Parisian art director. Her website has been designed by Fabio Carretti.

This website is very original—browsing on the home page is done by selecting and dragging the mouse. This motion reveals the author’s different projects. Although I personally didn’t find this functionality very intuitive at first, it gives a unique artistic touch to the web.

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#4 Alexander Engzell 

This isn’t a portfolio about design. I’m not trying to tell people “Hey, this is how you design.” Instead, this portfolio is designed to communicate what design means to me as a person.

Alexander Engzell

His website includes video, sound, and a whole set of animations that create the impression that you’re watching a movie instead of a website. Nice!

#5 Jony Guedj

Jony Guedj is a freelance film director making commercials, music videos, short-films, and, as a good Italian, pretty good pasta. His website has been designed by Benjamin Guedj.

The most striking thing about the design is the visualization of the portfolio of the author in a horizontal sliding gallery, quite different from what we’re used to!

#6 Anna Morosini

Anna Morosini is an Italian photographer who graduated in Modern Literature and holds a Master’s degree in High Level Contemporary Image at Fondazione Fotografia of Modena. Her website has been designed by Gusto Ids.

The animated and minimalist design invites you to enjoy the visualization of Anna’s incredible and sensual photographic work. A design perfectly aligned with the author’s work.

#7 Emanuele Papale

Emanuele Papale is a web designer from Pisa currently working in Amsterdam. The aim of his website is to showcase his design capabilities along with some projects. The menu is vertical and the portfolio display with animations is original.

#8 Katy Perry

I guess I don’t have to introduce the pop star, Katy Perry. Her WordPress website is a clean and daring site, which manages to combine the artist’s personal pop image with a magazine style functionality. Super easy to use!

Perry’s website proves that you can have a lot of personality using just a simple white background and easily navigable links, giving fans the option of listening, viewing, and learning easily as they please.

#9 Girl With a Camera

Girl With a Camera is Ashley Baxter’s photography blog in which she shares photos of her life and commissioned work. Ashley’s website was designed by Matt Brett.

I’d like to highlight from its design the way in which the design and background color of each post can be changed to better suit the content.

#10 Ben Pearce

Ben Pearce is a sculptor who graduated in Fine Arts in 2003, specializing in sculpture at Whanganui Quay School of Fine Arts and has exhibited regularly in New Zealand and Australia since then.

The design of his website, by Nick de Jardine, is very minimalist and the navigation to show his different sculptures invites you to continue browsing to see his work.

#11 Victoria Spicer

Victoria Spicer is a set designer and prop stylist, working in London. Her website is also designed by Nick de Jardine.

In this case, I would also highlight the originality of the page loading process and the navigation flow.

#12 Tyler Fink

Tyler Fink is a graphic designer in Ithaca, New York. His great website has been designed by himself.

I love the home page layout that allows you to write directly on top of each typeface the text you want and test if you like it—it perfectly achieves the objective he wants to achieve with his website!

#13 Tobias van Schneider

Tobias van Schneider is a German designer with great recognition in the design world. In his website, designed by him, you will discover his sources of inspiration, his secrets for success, and various career tips, along with many other ideas of this sector.

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The design and content of his website can be very inspiring if you’re thinking of an original design for your website.

#14 Fran Fernández

The blog of the Spanish singer Fran Fernández has a graphic design very expressive and slightly charismatic, which reflects the passion and personality of the musician.

His web has been designed by Guido Carini.

#15 David Blum

David Blum is a Swiss web designer who has designed a minimalist website to showcase some of his design work. You can also read his inspiring articles and see his resume.

I like the design of this website that has a clear objective and achieves it with the minimum, in a clear and simple way.

As you can see, my selection has been quite varied in terms of design elements, some of these pages being very new. Even if you don’t like (some of) them, they prove my point—personal websites should reflect the personality and creativity of their authors. And that should be one of the main objectives that any web design should achieve, don’t you think?

What are you waiting for to add your personal WordPress website in the comments section? We want to see them!

Featured Image by Martin Shreder on Unsplash.