When you are going to create a new website or redesign your current website, we recommend that you take a look at competitor’s websites, websites that have received a design award, those that have high sales volumes, or simply those that you find attractive. They are a very good source of inspiration to generate new ideas about the design of your website. So today we’re going to look at some outstanding examples: websites that look great and use design to clearly communicate their purpose.
As you already know, in our blog we have conducted a large number of interviews with WordPress professionals. From those conducted lately, we have selected the websites of some of them. These are their personal blogs, their professional websites, or the websites of companies directly founded by them. We have left out of this selection the websites of companies in which the interviewees collaborate or work but which have not been directly founded by them. As you will see, these are websites that reveal to a large extent the personality of who is behind them.
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Abha Thakor’s Website
Abha Thakor is an experienced journalist, researcher, and digital professional who is also involved in various WordPress teams and the WordPress 5.5 and 5.6 release team. She currently runs Non Stop News UK founded by herself, an organization focused on technology-related communication. The purpose of her website? Post news related to WordPress and technology.
Non Stop News UK website uses the Iconic One theme by Themonic that you can download from WordPress.org. This theme has more than 20,000 active installations and it is intended precisely to publish a blog or a magazine. In this case, Abha has not made any design modifications to the theme as it perfectly suited the purpose of her website.
Anyssa Ferreira’s Website
Anyssa Ferreira is a front-end designer and developer from São Paulo, co-founder of the Haste Design studio, specialists in the design and development of WordPress websites and plugins and mobile apps focused on user experience. The purpose? To show their style and the kind of projects they do.
In this case, it is a very fresh and modern website designed with a theme, Haste Four, created entirely by themselves and that includes animations to have more visual impact. It seeks to offer an image with a striking and modern style in which you can see the type of project they like to do.
David Baumwald’s Website
David Baumwald is a true full-stack developer, member of the WordPress Core Team and Core Commiter. He loves working as a freelancer and offers his services on his website {dream encode}. The purpose of his website is to let you know his skills, his projects, and how he works.
David has used the StanleyWP theme for the design of his website, a free theme created with Bootstrap developed by BlackTie.co. A very simple theme whose objective is to show, in a clean and simple way, a work portfolio.
Nelio Content
I’m so happy about Nelio Content that I will sound like a payed advocate… but here’s why you’ll love it: it works as promised, its auto-scheduling feature is top-notch, Nelio’s value for money is unmatched, and the support team feels like your own.
Panozk
Jenny Beaumont’s Website
Jenny Beaumont studied journalism and has worked in the web industry as a designer, developer, and project manager since the late 90’s and before the inception of WordPress. And, after freelancing for over 15 years, she joined the Human Made team in early 2017. The website jennybeaumont.com is a blog where she publishes posts related to his professional experience.
Jenny’s website is based on a fully customized theme designed by the creative studio pan-pan. She uses only two colors in the theme and her goal is, with a very clear design, to present herself and show her latest published articles.
Josepha Haden’s Website
Josepha Haden started as a professional musician and is currently the Executive Director of the WordPress Project. She works with Matt Mullenweg to make sure WordPress decisions are going in the right direction. Josepha maintains a personal blog where she publishes articles about her professional experience with an image of absolute transparency about the difficulties she is facing.
Josepha’s blog is based on the Eighties WordPress.com theme developed by Justin Kopepasah. An eye-catching single column them for creating a personal blog.
Marta Torre’s Website
Marta Torre is a full-stack, freelance developer who works with different professionals collaborating in web development projects. Marta’s website is her presentation website as a professional developer and she also shares articles in her blog about professional aspects with her personal touch.
Her website uses a child theme, Marta Torre Child, custom developed based on the WordPress Astra parent theme. The Astra theme is a very versatile and easily customizable theme that allows you to create websites with very attractive and clean designs quickly.
Mary Job’s Website
Mary Job officially started her relationship with WordPress in 2015 (before she had a sporadic encounter that didn’t appeal to her at all) and there is no turning back now. Mary founded the HowDoYou.Tech platform with the goal of providing answers to WordPress-related problems and challenges to people in Nigeria and Kenya. Additionally, they also offer database maintenance, scanning and optimization services.
The theme used on its website is Memberlite Theme, a theme whose objective is to create a professional membership website that already integrates key plugins that add functionalities to these types of websites (Paid Memberships Pro, bbPress, WooCommerce, Events Manager, Theme My Login, or Testimonials Widget).
Miriam Schwab’s Website
Miriam Schwab founded a WordPress development agency 15 years ago and later co-founded and is the CEO of an “unhosting” platform, Strattic, which not only hosts webs but also converts them to a static page architecture so that they are a lot faster and virtually impossible to hack. And indeed, you can check on their website that the pages load much faster than any standard website.
The Strattic website is made with a fully custom-developed theme with a very modern, careful, and impressive design that can serve as inspiration if you are looking to create a company website.
Sabrina Zeidan’s Website
Sabrina Zeidan is a graphic designer and multisite website developer. She performs website audits focusing on making websites fast by proposing improvements and she also develops WordPress plugins. Her personal website is the minimum expression of a website, she just wants to mention the service she offers without frills.
The theme she uses on her website is a child theme, SZ, which Sabrina has customized from the parent WordPress Twenty Seventeen parent theme. It’s simple, fast, and intuitive, so it perfectly serves the purpose of Sabrina’s website.
Tess Coughlan-Allen’s Website
Tess Coughlan-Allen was the Global Lead of WordCamp Europe in 2020 and currently combines the work of Head of Communications for the University of Bristol with promoting her own independent copywriting brand, Forwords. Her website is beautifully crafted and design and its purpose is clear: it’s Tess’s cover letter to her potential clients.
The Tess website is built with the free WordPress Twenty Twenty theme designed to get the most out of the WordPress block editor. It is a theme that not only allows you to make a good presentation of your business, but also allows you to have a blog with the content centered on a single column in a style very appropriate for a copywriter.
Tonya Mork’s Website
Of all the interviews I conducted last year, surely the most impactful was the one I did with Tonya Mork. Tonya is part of the WordPress Core team, she has been Triage Lead for WordPress 5.6 and 5.7 and she’ss a plugin developer and WordPress development trainer at Know The Code. Her personal website, Hello From Tonya, is a minimalist website with static pages where she uses WordPress on her blog.
The web pages are static. Why? Why not a full CMS? As she explains, the reason is the intent. The content rarely changes. Given that static pages run faster, there’s no need for a database or a CMS like WordPress. But her blog, Hello World Blog, is a WordPress site. For it, she has created a custom child theme, Hello-Minimal, with the Genesis framework.
Nelio’s Website
The purpose of our website is to let people know who we are and what products we offer. For this we wanted a clean design with its focus on our content.
On our website we have a custom Gutenberg-compatible theme. Notice the website uses a few custom blocks we developed to suit our needs. The purpose of our landing? To explain what we do, what products we offer, who is already with us, who we are and what we talk about in our blog. From there, we invite you to discover more details by visiting other pages of our website. We hope you like it!
The Purpose of Your Website
When your create a website, more than once your spend more time than necessary looking for themes and plugins with many more functionalities than you really need for the purpose of your website. The websites of these professionals, experts in WordPress, could have opted for very sophisticated designs and with many more functionalities than they currently have. But all of them have focused on the purpose and thus they’ve only included the features they really need. Chapeau to all of them!
Featured image of Brooke Cagle on Unsplash.
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