There’s a category of people who have no idea WordPress exists. Then we have the guys who have heard about the platform but never gave it a try. We have that other group of people who have tried WordPress but never took it far. And then we have the other caliber of guys who bend WordPress in unimaginable ways to build websites that are out of this world.
No matter the category you fall in, today’s post puts together 20 awesome examples of WordPress sites for your pleasure. This post serves as inspiration but more so as an illustration of the unparalleled capabilities and power of the WordPress CMS. Without wasting another second, let’s dig in.
La Pierre Qui Tourne
http://www.lapierrequitourne.com/
Let’s pack those bags and fly all the way to France, where we meet Isabelle and Benedict, the awesome guys behind La Pierre Qui Tourne organic biscuits. Theirs is a state of the art operation, and their website lets you in on the action smoothly as if you were right there in one of their points de vente aka outlets.With full screen sliders, amazing imagery, parallax, a responsive layout and alluring CSS animations, this website scores position one today for it’s simple albeit elegant design that leaves you craving for some biscuits.
Jay Z
Celebrities set the trends, and one of the biggest trend setting names in the music industry has got to be Jay Z. With a one of a kind design concept, and a strong sense of content direction, you don’t have to wonder why Jay Z’s site scoops our 2nd position. I mean, I have never seen or even imagined a design like this.The unique homepage gallery slider, effortlessly responsive design, and superb use of WordPress o-embeds (checkout those Soundcloud playlists) make this site an excellent example of what WordPress can do with the help of a skilled developer.
Eginstill
Then we have Netherlands, the home of Van Persie, tulips, canals and cyclists. We all know what Amsterdam, the capital, is best known for so I won’t go into details. Netherlands is also home to Eginstill, the interior design guys who “…don’t make kitchens…but…make room for all the things you find important in life.”Perfect imagery is a big thing in web development and the designers behind Eginstill WordPress site know this fact as well. Mouse triggered scrolling works amazingly well for this website you’ll wonder why you’ve never tried it on your own site.I don’t have the right words to describe why Eginstill is so awesome a WordPress site, you have to see it yourself to believe. Oh by the way, they use a pretty simple color scheme, but the results are amazing.
Cienne NY
If your target audience consists of young women, their lovers and anybody else who would do anything to stay ahead of the curve fashion-wise, you have to borrow a leaf from Cienne NY’s WordPress site.This WordPress site is simple, 100% responsive, comes with amazing images, a fixed menu and plenty of white space. You’d confuse this beauty with a one-page WordPress stunner, but it’s a multi-page site that loads so fast you might miss the beautiful CSS transitions. But that’s probably because Cienne NY serves content from Shopify’s CDN. Moving on…
Fubiz Media
Whoa, it didn’t take long to go back to France. And can you blame us? When it comes to beautiful design, the French don’t need your approval to impress. They don’t make excuses; they just do their thing and you are, well, floored.If you don’t believe these words, how about checking out Fubiz Media’s website? Mega menus, fixed menus, animated logos, CSS3 techniques, beautiful graphics and much more come together in a top-of-the-drawer affair that’s Fubiz Media’s site.What do they do again? They dabble in the arts. They’re an online magazine “…that delivers a vision and perspective on the latest news about creativity, inspiration and pop culture.” We could have given them the no.1 spot, but that’s taken, so fifth position it is. For now.
ESPN Sports Programming
Awwwards gives this website an average rating of 7.37/10.00. Design scores a 7.57, usability rates 7.29, creativity comes in at 7.14 and content fairs well at 7.29. Great scores if you ask me, but that aside.Every year, ESPN distributes 5,000+ hours of “…live events, highlights, series, studio and scripted media to broadcasters across the globe.” Their mission is to serve sports aficionados anytime, anywhere.But how do they pull off this seemingly monstrous feat? Ladies and gents, say a big welcome to ESPN Sports Programming website that runs on the ever-efficient WordPress platform. With over 14 million likes on Facebook only, you can bet this site pulls in a lot of juice. Still, WordPress carries the day for these folks. Scalability baby. Scalability.
Alexander Engzell
Enters engzell.me, the portfolio website of Alexander Engzell – a creative director from Sweden – and you can feel the exceptional synergy of WordPress fill up the room.Okay, no exaggerations, this is one WordPress website that has so much going on for it compared to one-pagers and multi-pagers alike. The graphics and the typography is on point. The CSS3 animations are exquisite. You’ve never seen a portfolio so simple yet so unbelievingly elegant and powerful. Until now.
HelloGiggles
Certainly you’ve stumbled upon HelloGiggles before – they’re home to tons of news about culture, food, entertainment, work, love, style and much more. And they pretty much show up in the search results when you Google just about anything.With an interesting magazine style layout, seamless integration of social media, clever placement of advertisements and cute details (like the “We Love You” in the footer) make this site a standout example of all the things that WordPress can do!
Bloomberg: Professional
Please lie for a moment, and tell me you didn’t see this coming from a long way off. Of course, Bloomberg earns a mention on this list because it is great an example of just how much you can achieve with WordPress.Bloomberg Professional, the Terminal, is (according to them) “the most powerful and flexible platform for financial professionals who need real-time data, news and analytics to make smarter, faster, more informed business decisions.” And they chose WordPress for their product promotion pages, FAQs and blog. Way to go Bloomberg, way to go.
Katy Perry
We are at number ten already? Pardon me, I didn’t realize we are rushing through the list with all these great WordPress sites. But let’s slow down a bit in this journey and take a look at Katy Perry’s WordPress powered website.Want a website that is completely customized, and 100% you? Look not further than WordPress. Just take a look at Katy’s. Flashing fullscreen image backgrounds, triangle cropped blog images, custom animations, a fancy double scroll twitter feed, awesome image lightbox galleries and so much more. A pretty awesome WordPress site if you ask us.
I Shot Him
There are no limits to the much you can achieve with WordPress once you put your heart and mind into it. I Shot Him is evidence enough.In a nutshell, I Shot Him is a San Francisco-based design studio. They “…believe design has the power to do more than sell a product, but that it can make a difference through altering perceptions, emotions and actions for the good of us all.”Featuring fixed menus, parallax, CSS3 animations and amazing typography among other features, you don’t need to look hard to see why I Shot Him made the list.
Iron to Iron
Brought to us by designer Kevin and developer Jonathan, Iron to Iron is one WordPress site worth checking out.The setup is pretty much straightforward but flat design, awesome typography, crazy animations, and great imagery among other features makes Iron to Iron quite the formidable WordPress site.Iron to Iron is located on 409 River Street, Troy, NY incase you’d like to pay them a quick visit.
GG Music & Audio Productions
WordPress isn’t just for designers, developers, creative directors and them other tech-savvy professionals, it’s for everybody and anybody looking for an elegant and powerful CMS.The platform is quite versatile and GG Music & Audio Productions know this all very well. Theirs is a multi-faceted WordPress site that focuses the reader’s attention on the content.“After a fair amount of resources and experimentation with Joomla, Drupal and WordPress, I settled on the latter for my own company blog, The Tinderbox. The progression to using WordPress as a CMS after that was a natural move. In my opinion where WordPress really excels is the fact that my client find it so easy to use.” – Adam Alloway, designer.
Girl With A Camera
Girl With A Camera is the portfolio website of photographer Ashley Baxter, which explains the amazing photos you’ll definitely love.She started out on Tumblr but the constant (and disappointing) downtimes that came with the service sent her looking for a better CMS. She found WordPress, which was incredibly easy to customize, and she’s never looked back.Now she just needs to concentrate on her Canon and WordPress does the rest. She can easily customize individual page/posts backgrounds to create the perfect mood to compliment her works.Well, if you’re based in Glasgow, Scotland and are looking for a beautiful and decent wedding photographer, you know where to look. BTW, she has a great portfolio and some amazing lookbooks you might want to check out.
Vogue India
As a globally renowned fashion magazine, Vogue pulls some serious traffic on the regular. But how do you serve a huge volume of multimedia content to a worldwide audience without breaking your site? You bank on the most dependable of CMS platforms – WordPress.And that’s exactly what Vogue India did, and now they get to keep a horde of fashion lovers thoroughly entertained with the best of fashion videos, stories, news, images, and so much more. They have so much CMS power to spare that they can afford to serve genius adverts as well.
Justin Bieber
Given that WordPress is used by nearly 1/4 of the websites on the internet, is it really that surprising that the Biebs is one of them? Whichever design company he hired did an awesome job creating a one of a kind boxed layout that seems to be a perfect fit for the singer.They added a feature rich top bar (complete with newsletter & social links), main slider with links to iTunes and recent music videos and of course a full blog where fangirls (and boys) can fin out what else Justin is up to. Plus his site has a photo gallery and upcoming events sections that are super unique but very necessary for any pop star. You better belieb it.
TechCrunch
Then we have TechCrunch, one of the most popular technology blog and a reliable source of news and information on startups.This 100% responsive WordPress site serves a whole lot of information in under 2.9 seconds, which is breathtaking for a site of its size. Whether it’s the design, the loading speeds, the great presentation of content and the numerous widgets among other sweet features, TechCrunch lets you experience WordPress at its best.Speed, scalability, presentation, power and more all in one CMS – WordPress.
Microsoft News Center
Have you ever heard of a little company called Microsoft? Yes, that Microsoft. They use WordPress for their news center. Why? Because WordPress is a reliable, customizable and easy to use platform.They’ve taken advantage of WordPress’ powerful ability to showcase a number of media formats, including videos. The clean and bright design is professional, eye-catching and easy to use making it perfect for customers to browse and utilize.
Sony Music
Sony Music has signed some of the best music acts of our time. From the likes of Whitney Houston, Brad Paisley, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley to Future and Travis Scott among others, Sony Music is no joke where good music is concerned.They know they have the musicians to thank for their success, which is probably why they made the website all about the artistes. Half the homepage features an impressive slider that showcases high quality photos of various acts.The rest of the site carries music videos, blog posts, news and social media content. It’s a simple site that packs quite a powerful punch. Or it is bang? A powerful boom bang? Boom twaff? No?
WPExplorer
How can we sign off without mentioning our very own WPExplorer. This site uses WordPress to serve the best content on all things WordPress related. Everything from tutorials, inspirational posts to list posts and the latest news, WPExplorer has your back covered.On top of that, we offer some of the best WordPress themes and plugins including the Total WordPress theme and Symple Shortcodes plugin. The design is clean and since we useWPEngine, you get to enjoy amazing page load speeds. I won’t go into the details, I will just tell you this: Think WordPress, think WPExplorer.
Final Words…
Hopefully this collection has inspired you to signup for awesome WordPress hosting, grab thebest WordPress theme for you and get started creating your own WordPress powered super site! It’s no secret WordPress is quite the popular CMS nowadays – the big and mighty love the platform, and so do newbies. Everybody is going gaga for WordPress. It’s provoking. It’s a revolution.And that’s because it’s incredibly powerful yet so easy to learn, setup and use. Many of the sites we’ve reviewed here are simple design-wise but powerful feature-wise, which should inform your design process in the future. After all, simplicity is the epitome of sophistication. Or as Nick puts it:
There is no easier CMS to use than WordPress. It is free, a one click install, and offers a massive collection of themes and design to choose from to get your new website online in minutes. – Nick Anderson, Daily Hosting.
Other than that, keep in mind some of these sites were designed, not by their owners, but experienced designers on a contract. That done with, I would like to mention that there are many other great WordPress sites out there created by developers and by regular folks too. It’s just too bad we can’t squeeze all of them into a single post.As such, we might have missed your favorite WordPress site. You might also feel a particular site doesn’t fit on this short list. Well, don’t hold back. If we left out your favorite WordPress site or you have suggestions, please drop us a line in the comment section below!